Sydney family says goodbye to video store business

Cape Breton's last video store is closing its doors this week. Sydney Video Ashby is part of what was once a chain of stores operated by the Sifnakis Family.

Mary Sifnakis says when VCRs came out in the early 1980's, they saw a need for video rentals.

They operated stores in Glace Bay, Sydney, North Sydney, Sydney River and one in Newfoundland.

Sifnakis says when they started renting out VCRs and people realized they could take movies home, the business "took off."

She says in the early days, the fee to rent a movie was $10.00. 

The growing popularity of  digital platforms over the last few years started to impact the video rental business, she said.

"Netflix was the beginning of it because they had a lot of movies, but it was older movies at a cheap price," she said.

After that, movie networks popped up trying to compete for business by putting free previews on television.

"Crave TV competing with Netflix and Shomi — that's another one.  All that hurt the business," she said.

She says it has become so bad there were weeks that they "didn't make ends meet," so they had to make the decision to close.

Sydney Video is now holding a movie sale to get rid of its stock and DVD's are selling for a dollar. 

Sifnakis says many of her customers are coming in to tell her how sad they are about the closure. 

The family greatly appreciates the support from the community over the past 35 years, she says.