Ah yes, money laundering, I know that one

Plenty of people still like having physical copies and some movies just can't be found online easily. Maybe they specifically stock films that can't be found elsewhere?

I can see it working if you have a few dedicated customers. I'd imagine many older people still prefer it.

People still collected records and CDs long after MP3 players became all the rage.

There's still a few dvd rental stores kicking around.

I think a lot of niche and cult classic film is being lost in the streaming wars.

We have a DVD store in Seattle that is loved by the city. I think it's employee owned too, not sure. https://www.scarecrow.com/index.html It's for obscure videos mainly.

Well, streaming has become such a pain and ordering physical media online has its own downsides thanks to inflated shipping fees. This seems like it might do okay if you had the right location. (Aka your rent isnt too high).

If you operated in an area with a lot of niche movie fans (maybe older customers or younger collectors) - if you can provided you can offer a selection of harder to find stuff, foreign and niche films, horror, any "boutique" physical media etc.

Collectable games also, being able to buy verified copies is a huge selling feature, the internet is swamped with fakes.

As someone else had already mentioned here , probably is a front.

As a commercial business, hard to see the profit. The old dvd version of netflix worked in a large part due to it getting rid of the per-item model with the late fees of the older video stores. Now that the 'pay for acess to a library' model has become the norm maybe that's just what they have here.

Though I don't have it out any more, there still is some odd satisfaction of physically looking through a shelf of actual media rather than searching on a screen. In some ways I'd compare it to people who use mechanical keyboards despite the noise and excess costs, it feels like your doing something rather than just viewing it