This is Niki's Fault

We tried out the Red Box for video rentals for the first time yesterday. Red Box is a phone-booth sized kiosk; you slide your credit card and it dispenses a movie, for $1 (plus tax) per night. It's been in our grocery store for a while, but I was a little skeptical of it until Niki started singing its praises. And I have to admit, it was pretty cool! Easy, convenient, and cheap.

However, we have a great independent, locally-owned video store with an excellent selection, so we'll probably keep going there for most of our movies. (In fact, I felt a little guilty using the Red Box, like we were cheating on the video store.) But in this case we could justify it because we rented Into the Wild, which we'd already rented once from the video store -- but then our DVD player went on the fritz so we didn't actually get to watch it. I didn't feel the need to pay another four bucks to see it. (And after seeing it, I'm especially glad we didn't pay another four bucks! It was an okay film, but I wouldn't especially recommend it. The book, on the other hand, is really good.)

PS: yes, we know about NetFlix, and no, we're not interested in it just now -- we don't watch movies often enough to really make it worthwhile.