Vulcan Video starts GoFundMe to help keep doors open

AUSTIN, Texas (FOX 7 Austin) - If you walk through the doors of Vulcan Video in Austin, nostalgia will instantly hit you. 

Vulcan was established in 1986 around the videotape boom of the mid 80's, when VHS and VCRs hit in terms of popularity.

"This is a capsule of both our pop history of time and of Austin,” general manager Jacob Knight said.

But recently the biggest hit for Vulcan Video has been a financial one.

"We used to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a week,” Knight said. “The GoFundMe came because we couldn't break even $200 on a Monday... yeah..." 

Knight and says he's built lifelong friendships working at Vulcan. To him, it's not just a video store, which is why he says it took him two hours to write the reason for creating a GoFundMe this week.

The GoFundMe says $35,000 is the goal in order to get them through the end of their current lease. Knight says they started to realize a financial strain in 2016 when they moved their main hub from Congress on Elizabeth Street to Russell Drive in South Austin.

He says they've lost about 75 percent of the customers they used to see before 2016.

"That's why we were like we don't know what else to do but put out smoke signals for people to come find us,” Knight said.

Knight says over the years through growth and development Austin has changed. Vulcan Video on the other hand, he says, has not.

''The old saying is keep Austin weird, this is the weirdness, this is what we're trying to keep as it becomes more modernized around us, we want to preserve a little bit of that community,” he said.

Knight says the Go Fund Me isn’t about the future, it's about the now.

"We've entered an age where everything is not readily made at your fingertips,” Knight said. “This is as much an archive as it is a video store. You can come to experience film history be it from like the 30's or even like D.W. Griffith all the way up to the new releases that just hit shelves."