Someday we’ll say to our children: There once was a thing called video stores, where you rented shiny disks containing movies, and then you returned them a few days later. To the kids, it will seem as distant as drive-in movie theaters.

That’s what I heard from a clerk at a Hollywood Video store last week.

The store was in Yorkshire Plaza, and the next day it was scheduled to close for good. So were two other local Hollywood video stores, one on North Lindbergh and one in Chesterfield.

Although there are several other Hollywood Video outlets around town, the clerk, Cadie, said that the business has been steadily shifting from specialty stores like hers to do-it-yourself kiosks, like the ones in some supermarkets and McDonalds restaurants, and to mail-order operations, like Netflix. Soon it would probably shift again, to streaming online video.

At her store, everything was for sale, from the videos to the fixtures to the snack foods. A couple days earlier, the store had sold hundreds of bags of cotton candy to a buyer who expected to re-sell them at one of the St. Patrick’s Day parades.

Me, I was interested in the movies.

Most of the high-profile new releases that used to line the side walls had already been sold; but in the center aisles, many of the remaining movies were the type you rarely find at Blockbuster. They included indies that had played very briefly in St. Louis, such as Mary Harron’s “I Shot Andy Warhol,” a wheelchair-bound George Clooney in the stumblebum caper comedy “Welcome to Collinwood,” and Robert Forster inas a world-weary gem peddler in “Diamond Men.” There were also several movies that had screened for the local critics (i.e., me) and then never got released here, movies like Robert Duvall’s politically confused “Assassination Tango” and John Travolta as Loosiana literature prof in “A Love Song for Bobby Long.” There were foreign films that played at the Tivoli to widespread indifference, movies that screened a single time at the St. Louis International Film Festivals and at least a half dozen misfired flicks starring Marisa Tomei.

Here are some of the obscurities I bought, for a buck-99 apiece:

George Hickenlooper’s “The Big Brass Ring” (shot in St. Louis, from a story by Orson Welles).

John Sayle’s “Casa de Los Babys” (because it was filmed in Acapulco at a great old hotel called Los Flamingos that was once owned by John Wayne and Johnny Weissmuller).

A road trip movie that I had never heard of.called “Coast to Coast” starring Richard Dreyfuss and Judy Davis.

“The Hottest State,” a little-seen love story directed by Ethan Hawke, from his little-read novel.

“The Aristocrats,” the all-star comedy doc about the dirtiest joke in the world.

“Incident at Lock Ness,” a wryly comedic pseudo-doc by Werner Herzog.

And appropriately, these oddities with a Hollywood theme:

Adam Goldberg’s dark celebrity spoof “I Love Your Work.”

A young Hilary Swank as a boulevard runaway in “Quiet Days in Hollywood.”

And Martin Short’s parody of what I do for a living, “Jiminy Glick in Lallawood.”

To quote the insatiably hungry Glick, “All for me! All for me!”