I go back a bit further, with a bank of 20 or so VCRs built into shelves and wired together along with signal boosters and an even more expensive 'playback only motherdeck' to hold the mastertape... Then you had 'Shipping' on Tuesdays & Thursdays when you just spent all day applying labels and sending them out via Royal mail in discreet packaging.
This was in the days when a single decent VCR went for over £500 ($700) and the fine for sending 'obscene material' through the post was in the region of £30,000 ($42,500) and a minimum of 6 months to a year in Prison...
That's when it was 'hard'... The web came along, and it was simply another place to advertise your mail order VHS tapes
Thats without the costs of the initial tapes themselves, the camera to shoot the content on, and the girls were paid a lot better then, than they are now !