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Store employee Kolton Koppa stands before shelves of movies at Video Theater in Coeur d’Alene. Video Theater, which also operates a store in Post Falls, is the only independently owned video rental shop still in operation in the area. (Kathy Plonka)

When Steve and Jannice Turk opened the first Video Theater location in Post Falls in 1984, the concept of watching movies at home was still a relatively new one. Owning your own tapes was a rather expensive hobby – VCRs typically retailed for several hundreds of dollars, and a stack of VHS tapes wasn’t much cheaper – so the rental store represented an acceptable compromise.

The Turks had no real competition when they launched the store, and their initial in-store stock consisted of about 300 tapes and 20 or so loaner VCRs. Business was steady enough – and the industry developed quickly enough – that they were able to open a second store in Coeur d’Alene a couple years later.

A lot has happened in the decades that followed. Nathan Weinbender, SR

* This story was originally published as a post from the blog "Huckleberries Online." Read all stories from this blog