Idaho's last video rental store was shutting down — except for one devoted 15-yr customer with Down syndrome

Sometimes the way a community helps a person can be heartwarming. Someone might be going above and beyond to make life easy for another person. A video store in Pocatello, Idaho, is doing something along those lines for a long-time regular customer. Although almost all video rental stores in the area have shut down, one of them still functions for its most loyal customers. The video store called Video Stop has sold most of its collections but has created a corner for one of its customers with Down syndrome, as it is a major part of her routine, according to East Idaho News.

The owner, David Kraning, has kept a small collection of his videos in a corner of his new K & B Kwik Stop location to ensure that his customer, 35-year-old Christina Cavanaugh, can continue her routine of renting videos. The woman has visited the store almost every day for the past 15 years, according to her mom, Toni Cavanaugh. Christina, who has Down syndrome, is mostly nonverbal and likes visiting the store to rent videos. It was a big relief for her mom when she learned that her daughter would be able to continue renting movies because of the video store's gesture. "It’s huge because it was a really heavy thing weighing on me…and then to find (this) out, it’s like being sentenced to prison and then getting a reprieve. That’s how much relief it was," the mom admitted.

Earlier, the mother and daughter had multiple options to go to before the video rental stores started closing down in the area. Video Stop and Great American Video were two of the mother-daughter duo's favorite stores. The woman would tell her mom which store she wanted to go to on a particular day. But when Great American Video shut down, it was no longer an option.

"She doesn’t understand things closing. She and I drive over and I let her get out of the car and she goes up and there’s nothing there and the doors are locked. She still wanted to go in and it was really heartbreaking to watch the anguish," Toni recounted.

Things were still okay because Video Stop was in business at the time. The store even trained its new employees to help Christina with her rentals. However, the mom heard that Video Stop might close even before an official announcement. "I think 'devastated' is a really good description because I thought, 'How am I going to explain this to her? What are we going to do?' It’s such a significant part of her life," the woman shared. The store owner tried to think of a solution and figured out that a corner in his new store was going to be unused, so he turned it into a space for video rentals so Christina could continue coming in to rent videos.

"That area was going unused, and I thought, 'OK, it wouldn’t be too much terrible work to just retrofit it, put some shelving in there and move some of the movies over, and just create kind of a mini video store corner for this kid, so she still could have her normal routine that she’s used to,'" Kraning explained. "I said, 'Oh, it’s Christina’s corner.’ It’s not, but that’s just what I would call it because he kind of did it for her," the mom pointed out.