ARIZONA CITY — Before Redbox gained popularity as a movie and video game rental kiosk, two juggernauts vied for the top spot in movie rentals.
Blockbuster and Hollywood Video were the best known movie rental businesses in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then both companies are near extinction with the exception of one Blockbuster store, and various independent little shops have opened up around the country, such as Jackie’s Place.
A slight difference between Jackie’s Place and other movie rental stores is that the profits made from the movie rentals go toward hurricane relief efforts with Operation Kidz Kare of Arizona City, which Jackie Bell operates herself.
“We take the funds from the movie rentals and purchase school supplies and children’s items and we take them every year to a hurricane relief area,” Bell said. “When people donate music and movies here to the video store, that’s what those donations are for.”
Along with using the profits from her store to pay for fuel for the trip, buy supplies and just donate toward relief efforts, Bell also accepts donations such as clothing items and gift cards to take to a hurricane relief area in September.
“I don’t know what’s going on this year,” she said. “We’re still kind of waiting to see what’s going to go on. It’s all up to Mother Nature, but we’re going to be ready either way. I don’t know if we’re going to be going to a new hurricane zone or if we will possibly do some backup relief.”
Bell has helped out with natural disaster relief for several years. She did so with Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Tennessee tornado in 2008 and Hurricane Michael last year.
She started off volunteering with a Christmas toy drive in Virginia before she moved out to Arizona City with her daughter.
“It just kind of grew,” Bell said. “Every year I tried to do something different until we came here — I wanted to do something more on a permanent basis. I have an ultimate goal, I would like to be a private charity that helps here also. We tried a school drive here, but not too many people had clothes to give. I’ve been helping in places of disaster because that’s easier to collect for, for some reason.”
Last year, Bell made the trek out to Florida and ended up in Lynn Haven. If there isn’t a hurricane that causes too much devastation this year, she expects to make her trip back to Lynn Haven to continue helping there.
Bell usually avoids going where the Federal Emergency Management Agency is set up because that area usually has the most help.
Additionally, Bell has a letter from FEMA that states she has experience with relief aid, which makes it easier when dealing with law enforcement, but she rarely faces any problems because she heads out to a different area that receives little to no help.
She added that the reason they make the trip out to the relief areas is to make sure that the people actually receive the supplies and they’re not being stored away somewhere.
“We make sure that we take a lot of photos and then we post them on Facebook so that our donors know exactly what we’re doing,” Bell said. “We don’t put the faces of the kids in the pictures, but we show what we’re doing and they really appreciate that because they can actually see where their donation is going.”
Bell mentioned that sometimes relief efforts tend to be a waiting game and just listening for some of the smaller and poorer communities that don’t garner television attention.
“When we went to Lynn Haven we ended up at a church that lost both their sanctuary and their fellowship hall,” she said. “We were able to unload right there and the people were swarming the car. We watched two little boys crawl back up into a truck where their mattresses were because their house was destroyed and they couldn’t even go in to get their stuff. They were sleeping in the back of the truck in their front yard.”
She added that sometimes helpers don’t carry some items that the people need because the items are things one wouldn’t think of taking.
“We had an incident where people were needing totes to put their clothes in,” Bell said. “I was thinking it was going to be easy and we’d just go to Walmart. We went to Walmart and there was nothing on the shelves so they didn’t have anything to put their clothes in and we ended up emptying out our totes and giving them away. It’s heartbreaking when you don’t have what people need, especially children.”
Some of the supplies Bell delivers include gas cans, diapers, personal hygiene items, socks, children’s clothing and shoes, and school supplies.
“We learn something new every year,” she said. “School supplies, I never was thinking about that when we first went down. We don’t think about it, but hurricane season always happens at the beginning of the school year and so we are big on collecting school supplies to take down. Not paper because that’s cheap enough to buy once you get there, but more like crayons and backpacks because they also use that in the shelters.”
Bell added that she doesn’t deal with her emotions while she’s out there helping, it’s after she leaves when everything comes crashing down on her.
“It’s hard,” she said. “I don’t know why but I’m able to shut my emotions off for the time being, but once I walk away I can go through a crying cycle. The hardest part of going is when you have to say no because you don’t have what they need. You always hope that you have enough cash so that you can help them. It just rips my heart out that you can’t do more, but you can only do what you can do.”
