Mel Kamins remembers when his General Video of America's main stock was comic books and newsstand magazines, 8mm loops, paperbacks, and softcore "girlie" books. That was then, this is now - and now means XXX videos and DVDs, magazines on and past the edges, sex toys, and its Star Flicks video chain. And he says there's a new generation of porn buyers…and sellers.
One of the first adult distributors in the United States from its nondescript downtown Cleveland building, General Video now limits its selling to roughly the area from western Pennsylvania to Indianapolis, so as not to step on sister GVA organization territories.
But one thing Kamins never expected was that his daughters would wind up working in the family business.
"When I was in college," recalls eldest daughter Rondee Kamins, "my father and I had conversations about me coming to work here. At first, he was very much against it... he didn't want to bring a daughter into the business because, you know, just the trouble that can happen in this business: going to jail, getting arrested."
"I don't mind it," says the sexagenarian (no pun intended) Kamins, "but the thinking of our generation was that men go into it, not women. But I see nothing wrong with it, really. She's very capable."
Rondee started out as a Star Flicks manager. The 34-year-old holds a degree in criminology, publishes twelve local and national Connection magazines, is operations manager for GVA's Private Entertainment mail-order company, oversees several Star Flicks, and is poised to head up GVA's Internet operations, which the company expects to be finished by mid-2000.
"It's all going to be new this year," Rondee says of her Internet duties, "so we haven't sat down with all the people involved to figure out exactly what's going to happen. We know where we want to go; we just have to figure out how to get there."
Still, Rondee's presence at GVA is emblematic of many of the changes taking place in both the company and adult businesses at large. "I think the biggest problem here is, we have a lot of people who have been around who are my dad's age, and they've always done business in a certain way," she explains. "I'm more of a buffer between the people here and my dad and other people who are in charge. It's kind of like the younger set comes to me.
"The Net awareness level here is low," she notes. "Some of the younger people - the 20-somethings and 30-somethings who are more Net savvy on their own - are more adaptive to what we're trying to do with the Internet, but the 40-, 50-, 60-year-olds have a real hard time understanding what we're doing at all. They've always done business in a certain way, and I think it's really hard for them to understand the Web and that we might make money off of it."
But instrumental though she was in computerizing much of GVA's functions, she doesn't see the Internet as a panacea for the adult industry's ills, nor even as a replacement for the basic mom-and-pop adult store.
"I'm not sure there's ever going to be replacement for a store," Rondee says, speaking of the "Internet revolution." "I think people still want to touch things, see things. People are going to be able to watch adult movies over the Internet but they're not going to be able to use rubber goods over the Internet."
"We're going to try to help our customers and not go directly to the consumer," Mel promises about GVA's Internet sites. "We're going to try to set up a kind of a theater where you can see all the stuff, like some of the majors are doing. I'd rather go that way. 'Go into Bob's Bookstore in Norfolk, Virginia,' or you can get online and see 'Bob's Bookstore' and get these things. Like they could place an order online and we'd give Bob something like 25 or 30 percent. Something where you can protect your customers, because they need protection."
However, "[The Internet] is going to hurt," he warns. "It's starting to hurt [adult stores] now, and in the next year, it's really going to start hurting bad, because more people are getting computers, more people are online, and [they] can sit in their home and browse a hundred titles without even having to walk out of the house. But people are still going to go to an adult store. They want to walk in and see the products. Toys are going to be very tough to do [on the Internet], I think, at this point."
In fact, GVA goes a few steps further than simply making it possible for would-be buyers to touch its stock.
"We send people out [to help the stores] all the time," declares Harvey Horowitz, one of the "old guard" of GVA's video division. "In our warehouse, we have a mock-up of a store that we invite people from all over to come in, and we give them ideas all the time, whether to sell marital aids, whether to sell other related items besides videos. If it's a mom-and-pop video store, we tell them, 'You don't have to put in this stuff, but you can put in this stuff.' We've always tried to encourage people to come up because we like people to meet us, and when they meet us, they find out we're down-to-earth and we're legitimate [business]people.
"And I'll tell you," he continues, "throughout the years we've had a lot of customers that have left us for price, but we've got quite a few that have come back, because they found out, in the long run, we've probably been the most honest company out there. We don't lie to the customers; that's not our selling technique. We've been an up-front company; we've helped the people legally if they got in trouble. We have attorneys on the staff if they wanted advice, or if they've gotten letters [from local officials], or they're paranoid, things of this nature. And if we can't answer it, we'll refer them to our attorneys at no charge and they can ask them. We've helped people who don't even buy from us in some cases. Because we know, if an area goes down here, it doesn't take long to spread to another area."
Horowitz also sees little challenge from Internet retailers.
"A lot of people get into it and we sell people who are on the Internet, but they're very limited buyers," Horowitz opines. "They don't have the access nor do they have the facilities to put as much product on or even stock as much product as we do, so most of your smaller Internet people are not what you'd call 'full-line.' They can't be. We can offer thousands of items that we carry in stock, but I don't think a little independent guy can do that. That's why we're here, and why we'll still be here after a lot of those are gone."
