ATTENTION ALL UNIVERSITY students: The time has come for us to grow up, and invest in our futures. Or rather, it’s time to invest in our erotic interests. According to Leonard Elchuk, a Saskatchewan businessman who financially backed a string of porn shops across the province, the rise of the Internet has dealt a serious blow to the retail side of the porn industry.
In the late ‘90s, when Elchuk was approached by friends to finance their sex shop business, there was little reason to say no.
“You can’t just borrow money for [opening a sex shop]. There is no financial institution that will lend you money for that business,” he said. “You just invest in the business in cash. So I invested in them, and then ended up buying them out.”
At one point, Elchuk owned a total of nine stores.
“Nobody was in [the sex shop business],” he said. “It was a business that the majority of the public had labelled taboo, so there’s not many people who really wanted to be in that business, whereas now it’s become a lot more of a mainstream business. With the change in generation, people don’t really care. It’s not really that taboo anymore.”
Owning a string of sex stores may seem like a teenage boy’s dream, but for Elchuk, the appeal of the business was purely financial. The advent of the Internet, however, meant business took a turn for the worse.
“It’s been on a steady decline for the last five years,” he said. “It’s getting to the point where there used to be big money in it—like huge money—but the thing is you can have access to pretty much anything you want on the Internet, and buy it for a lot cheaper.”
Like any other retail business, the biggest struggle is to stay above the competition, and our generation’s tendency towards streaming video content has forced sex shops selling DVDs toward extinction.
“Internet is really starting to take away from the retail of that business, especially on the DVD and movie end,” said Elchuk. “It’s no different than what’s happening to Rogers Video and Blockbuster. The Internet is wiping all of that aspect of the business right out. That’s really taken its toll definitely on the video end, but on the novelty end as well.”
So why not kill two birds with one stone? Support the industry by heading to your local sex shop and treating your special someone to an X-rated DVD.
—Spencer Van Dyk
