Keeping the lights on.
A couple of times a week Haare Te Wehi makes a three-hour roundtrip, just to rent a handful of DVDs. A goatee-wearing millennial movie buff with an impressive enthusiasm for back-to-back screenings, the South Aucklander is a regular at Morrinsville United Video, one of the last remaining video stores in New Zealand. “I’m here every week,” he says cheerfully, arriving in store after his third 115 kilometre stretch of driving in two days. “I did four movies in one night last night, and I’m doing another four tonight.”
It’s a hell of a commitment, but one Haare seems happy to make, having turned away from the supposed convenience of Netflix a while back. “I’ve been coming to these kinds of places since I was a kid hiring out Need for Speed Underground,” he says. “It’s amazing just to get that feeling again. You come here and you feel warm inside. It’s community.”
This tiny community is kept afloat by Wilfred Buser and his wife Coralie, Zimbabwean immigrants who have lived with their four children in Morrinsville for nearly 20 years. They’ve been in the video-hire industry since 1983, and when the opportunity to buy an existing United Video in their new hometown cropped up not long after they arrived, they took it. In the early days,
