Clerk Dogs, that is. Clerk Dogs is a new movie recommendation website developed by Stuart Skorman, founder of Empire Video, a small video chain in Vermont, and most notably Reel.com. If you are anything like me, renting a movie is a display of utter indecisiveness and mindless meandering around the video store hoping that the perfect movie will just leap off the shelf and into your hands. Most video stores post generic lists of the most popular rentals of the week but this doesn’t help if the top pick is a video based on the latest Stephen King novel and you were in the mood for a comedy. What if you try to base your selection on recommendations? What movie did your friend say she liked? What movie got the 5-star review last week? Did Leno give this a thumbs-up? Unless you are walking around with Ebert and Roeper it is almost impossible to keep track of the good, the bad and the ugly.

According to this article, the idea for Clerk Dogs started at Empire Video where Skorman asked customers one question “Name a movie you’ve seen in the past that you’re in the mood for something similar tonight.” This question is not only the foundation for the business, but it is also the key to Clerk Dogs competitive advantage. According to Skorman “We knew more about them [customers] than Netflix could ever know, because we knew exactly what they were in the mood for at that moment.” This knowledge was then translated onto the Web but the recommendations have been created by video store clerks, not by a computer algorithm.

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