By Kyle Arensdorf

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Two movie posters featuring “Grown Ups 2” and “Evil Dead,” both movies with 2013 DVD release dates, are all that remain in the window of Premiere Home Video on Euclid Avenue.

Bob Jefferson, the store’s manager, will be closing the doors of one of the last remaining video stores in Lexington on April 1. He said it was a business decision.

Former Premiere manager Terri Robbins said she heard that Kroger had plans of leasing the space where the store sits, at the corner of Euclid and South Ashland avenues.

The current Kroger building will be demolished and replaced with an 86,000-square-foot facility that will have rooftop and surface level parking.

Tim McGurk, a spokesman for Cincinnati-based Kroger’s mid-South division, said that Kroger is still in talks with Jefferson to take over the lease of the store.

Two customers scoured the nearly-empty shelves of Premiere Home Video on Wednesday, picking up as many clearance DVDs as they could carry.

“I wish I could have come earlier so I could have gotten the good movies,” said psychology sophomore Mellisa Estebo, holding an armful of discounted DVDs.

Estebo, who has been a Premiere customer for more than a decade, said she’s against the decision to close, and hates the idea of renting movies online and not being able to hold a hard copy. “It’s like a book. There’s something to be said about holding an old DVD case in your hands.”

With the emergence of Netflix and Redbox, video stores are becoming an afterthought.

“(Redbox) isn’t any different than a coke machine; you’re going to get what you get and the service is going to be what you’d expect from a machine,” Robbins said.

Netflix occasionally retires movies — like “Top Gun” — and then they are hard to find in any form, said Ray Preston, a Premiere customer since the late 1990s. “I prefer to have a collection. I like to have a library, something I can keep.”

Preston said he’s been coming to Premiere Home Video every day for about three weeks to buy films for his collection. “I’ve bought well over 100,” he said.

Robbins now helps out in her husband’s store, the

Premiere Home Video in the Hartland Shopping Center, which is the last remaining movie store in Lexington.

“We vowed that we would be the last video store standing in this town, and now we are,” Robbins said. “We hope that we can keep it going as long as possible.”

While students can rent movies from the W.T. Young Library, Robbins said that the Hartland store has been gaining a new clientele of

students in need of movies for school. They plan to start

accepting Plus Account by the start of the fall semester.

Despite the Netflix craze, many people still prefer the personal touch of renting from a store.

“People want to talk to others about their favorite movies, or want suggestions of what movie to watch,” Robbins said. “You just can’t get that online or with

Netflix.”