Roughly a mile from the Little Bay de Noc in Michigan’s upper peninsula, tucked in a strip mall off Interstate 2, you’ll find Family Video, the last video rental store in the city of Escanaba.
Family Video has been a dependable source of entertainment in this post-industrial town for 20 years. Today, the store’s neon green-and-orange marquee reveals the only discernible change to the place in the past two decades: instead of the week’s new movie releases, the letters announce WE SELL CBD NOW! The pivot to cannabis might seem like a major branding miss for a “family” video store in a straight-laced rural area, but Escanaba residents who frequent the store aren’t bothered by the change. They know Michelle Graham manages Family Video, and Michelle can be trusted.
When Michelle started working at Family Video five years ago she was well suited for the job. An extremely personable 35-year-old mother of five, it was easy for her to treat her customers like members of her family, which incidentally was part of her job description. The tedious aspects of the job that would bother most people—patiently nodding through dubious justifications for late rental returns, or listening to a scandalized mother rant about movie ratings—were minor obstacles en route to getting to know and understand her customers more deeply. “I’m like a sponge.” Michelle told me, her brown hair and glasses framing her smile when I spoke with her in July. “I soak up everyone’s stories.”
Today, Michelle’s conversations with customers have higher stakes. Since Family Video started selling CBD in 2019, she has been working with the urgency of an ER physician and the passion of a born-again preacher to deliver the good news about CBD—a cannabis compound that doesn’t contain psychoactive THC—to penny-pinching skeptics and convention-loving “Yoopers”. The vigor of her approach makes it clear why Escanaba’s Family Video is consistently named one of the top ten sellers of CBD products from among the chain’s more than 700 outlets nationwide. The breathless excitement with which Michelle speaks to anyone who will listen about the nuances of CBD, the proper way to use it, the different effects of an oil versus a balm and other details might come across as a sales pitch, unless you know the motivation behind it. For years, Michelle has watched as opioid addiction has devastated her community; in CBD, she sees a potential remedy. For Michelle, Escanaba is a city on fire, and through Family Video she’s found herself in an odd position to fight the blaze.
Twelve years ago Michelle was in a car accident that sent her from the back seat of a car through the front windshield. Since then, she says she’s been “living with the body of an 80-year-old.” She’s had chronic back, nerve, and joint pain, a bone spur, vision loss, carpal tunnel tendonitis, arthritis, and deterioration of tendons and cartilage in her knees and ankles. She had foot surgery for plantar fascitis. She lost her spleen which has left her battling hemorrhoids and severe anemia. And she was only managing three to four hours of sleep a night due to pain.