Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (May 24/02) - Every morning Rose Johnson unlocks Superior Video, walks inside and turns on the store's televisions.

A cup of coffee in hand, she pops in her morning shot of humour: Shrek. It's a ritual, something she does every morning, five days a week since the motion picture was released on video. Sometimes, she watches Shrek even when she's not at work.

"I get a laugh out of Shrek," she says. "Eddie Murphy makes me laugh, and I need the laugh first thing in the morning."

After Shrek, she pops in Driven, then The Fast and the Furious. It's a daily routine -- a dose of humour followed by a more serious ration of fast cars. The only days she leaves the TVs off are when she has a migraine.

Johnson is the manager of Superior Video, a post she has held since last August. She took the job after seven years with Tim Hortons -- this is a relaxing change of pace.

"It's something stress-free," she says.

Even so, working in a video store is about more than sitting around and watching videos all day. She is in charge of taking videos off the shelf to be sold as "previously-viewed" and she manages the rotation of all the videos in the store.

The process is simple. A video spends its first six months as a new release. Then it spends six months as a Top 100. Currently, there are 992 videos in those categories, which are displayed on shelves rimming the store.

After a year, Johnson takes the video down, sells off all but one VHS and one DVD as previously-viewed and pops the movie into the older video shelves.

The sales are a way to recoup some of the costs not covered by rentals: movies in VHS format cost $90 a piece, while DVDs cost $60.

Johnson gets rentals for free, and she uses the privilege. In the past seven years, she has been to the theatre twice: once for Water World, another time for First Night.

And the movies she takes home are different from the movies she watches in the store. She's only allowed movies that are PG or 14A inside the store, but her preferred genre is horror. Stephen King is her "idol" and she owns all of his books and all of his movies.

But while a steady stream of free flicks is a perk, she also has to run a store.

Her pet peeve, she says, is "people hanging out in front of my TV and watching movies."

This is, after all, a rental store.