Highway 101 flaunts stunning deciduous trees, winding curves, and small coffee shops that serve chicken strips and Olympic Mountain Ice Cream. In between the stretches of trees and grocery stores resides a nondescript DVD vendor, its only marking a white paper sign with black font that reads “$1 DVDs”.
The abundance of streaming services makes watching TV and movies accessible and instantaneous. If you don’t like a movie, you can switch the title in less than a minute. The relatively low cost of monthly subscriptions incentivizes simultaneous subscriptions to multiple services. Nothing good on Netflix? Maybe Hulu has something.
Streaming platforms provide a virtually endless selection of material to watch, so why is this DVD store still in business? Are DVDs still relevant? The Olympic peninsula offers a fascinating case of supply and demand. Due to the peninsula’s isolation, many of its residents don’t have WiFi, an essential for streaming. Instead, they turn to books, DVDs, or download movies and TV shows from streaming sites at nearby WiFi hotspots.
Are CDs and DVDs actually obsolete? Definitely not in the peninsula. Although some may view a preference for a more “analog” type of entertainment as antiquated or old-fashioned, the act of rifling through shelves of DVDs offers a charm that scrolling through Netflix cannot. Besides, the scenery of the peninsula exceeds the view of the Netflix home page any day.
