Star Tribune
The Twin Cities’ last remaining video store to close its doors
If you want to identify a villain for the demise of Video Universe, the black hat, pointy mustache and dastardly laugh belong to Netflix.
Owner Scott Prost is closing his Robbinsdale store, which he believes is the last of its kind in the state. Video Universe survived switches from Beta to VHS, VHS to DVD and DVD to Blu-ray, Blockbuster’s hegemony and Redbox, as well as Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service. It even withstood the pandemic.
But with Netflix, Apple TV+ and other streamers producing movies that are not available on physical media, Prost has decided to close the store in May.
“People would come in, asking for titles and we just didn’t have them. They’d say, ‘Do you have that new Tom Hanks movie, ‘Greyhound’? And we didn’t. We couldn’t get it,” said Prost, who cited “Coda” and “Nomadland” as sought-after titles that were available only to stream. “There were fewer and fewer new releases and fewer people coming in to get them.”
The “new release” wall attests to that. Many of its titles are not new, including “News of the World” from 2020. A “Star Trek: First Contact” poster seems to warn about the reach of Netflix with its slogan: “Resistance is futile.”
Prost will sell the contents of the store and has some titles on sale already, with all movies, posters, mementos and shelvingavailable starting March 1. He’s hoping everything goes by Memorial Day. When he announced the closing at the end of December, customers said they’re as disappointed as he is.
“It does get sad. People come in crying,” Prost said.
One of those customers is Nadia Anderson. At 22, she’s part of an age group that has embraced streaming, but she’s not a fan.
“My family has been going to Video Universe since before I was born,” said Anderson, who has difficulty streaming at her home in Nowthen because of internet issues. “They have the largest selection, and they’re so friendly. Anytime I had a question, they were on it, making sure I went away with something I’d like.”
That selection of 30,000 to 40,000 titles is what Prost said he thinks will be missed most.
“We have a lot of weird stuff, foreign stuff, classics. People would come from all over for that,” he said. “Many of them are out of print.”
John Heimbuch found that out the hard way. The cinema production student at Minneapolis College wanted David Lynch’s drama “Wild at Heart.”
“It was not available on any streaming platform, to view or to rent. I could not find it,” said Heimbuch, who said he values the store’s knowledgeable staff and unexpected treasures. “But Video Universe had it. I keep thinking about what it means to lose these things.”
So does Prost, remembering 1983, when he was hired at a competing store called Video Central. Back then, it was all about VHS tapes. They felt like an entertainment revolution.
“When it happened that movies were, for the first time, now available to be taken home and watched, it was astounding. You could watch a theatrical movie and not be at the mercy of the networks,” said Prost, who was hired as Video Universe’s manager in 1986 and later became the owner.
As he watched other “old school video stores” close, Prost contemplated what it means to be part of the end of an era. According to a research company survey, U.S. video and game stores declined nearly 16% last year, and there are only 667 left.
He will miss getting to know fellow movie fans.
“People would be at the ‘new release’ wall, talking about sports, while their kids were running around and picking movies,” said Prost, whose most-rented titles include “Fargo,” “Grease” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” “You get to have ongoing relationships with customers. You see their kids growing up.”
One of those kids is Anderson, who often visited the store with her mom: “It’s a thing in our house. We’d get coffee on the way and go to the video store.”
A customer for three decades, Dan Elliott said Video Universe also seems frozen in time, with even the carpeting unchanged.
“He had Kids’ Days — Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I believe — and that was a ritual when my kids were young,” said Elliott, who guesses he rented 10,000 titles from Video Universe. “We would walk there from my house every week.”
Thinking about the work it will take to clear out the store, Prost said, “It’s really more of a video museum now. You see all the comedies from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, 2000s, all in the same spot. Each movie is like a time capsule of when it was made.”
Prost said he’s glad Video Universe stuck around as long as it did, providing the biggest selection it could.
“Video had its day in the sun, I guess,” he said, helping a customer bag up John Wayne DVDs for her collection. “We’ll be turning the lights off on this business, pretty much. Turning the lights out on video rental in this state.”
Rochester police are investigating the death of a man who was shot to death Thursday evening on the city’s southeast side.
According to police, dispatchers got a report shortly before 7 p.m. about a shooting near SE. 10th Street and 1st Avenue. First responders performed life-saving measures on the victim, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said the shooting did not appear to be random.
Rochester has seen one murder and one negligent homicide in each of the last three years, according to police reports.
Star Tribune
Jury to decide fate of two men charged in connection with cold-weather deaths of family found at Canada-Minnesota border in 2022
FERGUS FALLS, Minn. – Two men on trial for their roles in a human smuggling network on the Canadian border knew that 11 Indian migrants were at risk from the cold, but never called off plans to cross them into the United States or even phone for help on their behalf after most of the group got lost for hours in a blizzard, a prosecutor told the jury on Thursday.
While the migrants were “slowly dying in the freezing cold, Steve Shand sat in his warm van and did nothing to help,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael McBride in his closing arguments. “Harshkumar Patel texted from sunny Florida and did nothing to help. For weeks, they knew the cold would kill, but they decided their profit was more important than these human lives.”
As a result, McBride said, a family of four froze to death in the snow on Jan. 19, 2022.
After hearing more than three days of evidence, jurors will start deliberations Friday in the trial of Patel and Shand on counts of conspiring to bring unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. and transport them, causing serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy. They will also determine the defendants’ guilt on attempted transportation of aliens in the U.S. for commercial advantage or private financial gain, and whether they aided and abetted that crime.
In their final pitch Thursday, defense attorneys lamented the tragedy that befell Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife Vaishaliben, 37; their daughter Vihangi, 11, and son Dharmik, 3. But they urged jurors to be critical of witnesses with shifting testimony, prosecutors jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence, and the culpability of other players.
Jurors heard testimony earlier in the week from convicted West Coast smuggler Rajinder Pal Singh that Fenil Patel, an Indian national who lives in Toronto who’s been charged by Indian police for the family’s deaths, had arranged for the migrants to get Canadian visas so they could illegally cross into the U.S.
Defense lawyer Aaron Morrison said there was a conspiracy between Fenil Patel, Singh and Harshkumar Patel and that they used his client, Shand. (Patel is a common name in India, and the defendants and victims are not related.)
Morrison emphasized that his client had always used his real name and ID when booking flights from near his home in Orlando, Fla., to Minneapolis, and renting cars that he drove to northern Minnesota. He described Shand, a Jamaican American who spent his life in warm climates, as clueless — not only about the migrant transport jobs from the border area to Chicago that prosecutors said Harshkumar Patel paid him to do, but also about cold weather.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed an ordinance Thursday creating a labor standards board made up of workers and employers that would recommend industry regulations for pay, safety and equity.
The Minneapolis City Council easily passed the ordinance last week by a vote of 9-3, enough to override the veto if their votes don’t change.
The board would be made up of an equal number of business owners, employees and other community stakeholders who would create work groups for various industry sectors and recommend policies to the City Council. Supporters of the board say it will just be an advisory board to the council, which can decide whether to propose regulations. Opponents say it creates another layer of government.
More than two years ago, Frey and a majority of council members said during a news conference that they supported creating a labor board, but they’ve since disagreed on how the board should be structured. In the intervening time, local and national industry groups mounted an advertising campaign against the board, a coalition that has only grown.
Frey said the council’s proposal was “lopsided” to the point where hundreds of businesses, including nearly all major business organizations, came out against it and said they wouldn’t participate.
“If we want this Labor Standards Board to work, business participation isn’t just important, it’s essential. Under the Council’s proposal, business participation is negligible – and everyone knows that’s not going to work,” Frey said in a news release Thursday. “Council must pass a board that is balanced and inspires collaboration from both labor and business.”
The mayor said he’d support a board that is “fair and balanced,” with a 50/50 split between employers and employees, a 50/50 split between mayoral and council appointments, and a requirement that a super-majority of the board support recommendations before they could advance to the City Council. The plan approved by the council didn’t include those provisions.
Michael Rubke, a condo worker who pushed for a labor standards board for over two years, called it “incredibly frustrating” that Frey vetoed the ordinance, saying condo workers have been fighting for years for a space where they can sit down and find solutions to issues.
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