The last Blockbuster in the world, located in Bend, Oregon, is weathering the pandemic by tapping into the nostalgia of the iconic video store chain, while also offering sleepovers through Airbnb and selling merchandise sourced through local vendors.
Plus, at a time when consumers are done scrolling through Netflix and Hulu and have watched everything there is on Amazon Prime due to the continuing theater closures and production stoppages because of the pandemic, Blockbuster offers tangible content for which people actually have to leave their homes. People wanted to help so much, in fact, that the server crashed in early August due to orders. But Harding decided to play up the nostalgia factor a bit more and teamed up with Airbnb for locals to sleep over at the establishment for one night.
In fact, it runs on computer systems that are not connected to the internet, and the employees still use floppy disks and hand-written membership cards, because the dot-matrix printer broke. During the pandemic, someone who had worked for IBM cleaned out his garage and found pieces and asked if I wanted them, and he brought me parts and pieces.
Blockbuster to close more stores. Four Blockbuster stores to shut. Blockbuster to close 72 stores. Blockbuster back in administration. Blockbuster originally went bust in January Blockbuster's parent company has been closing stores in the US.
Before its troubles began, Blockbuster had stores. After all, most of the rental industry collapsed with it. And today we live in a world of streaming movies, not physical rental videos. But nothing was preordained about the streaming era, either. Just as with video rental, it resulted from numerous business and policy decisions.
I asked just about everybody I talked to for this story to imagine an alternate universe where Blockbuster had survived. Very few saw much, if any, retail as part of that alternate history. And that includes franchisees, whose businesses were purely retail. Most thought Blockbuster would likely be a Netflix-like content and technology provider, with maybe some token stores here and there.
In one of his newsletters, Smith posited that Blockbuster could have relied on its brick-and-mortar footprint to be a kind of small-space neighborhood movie theater. It built a high-cost physical retail business during a time when that was the most efficient way to deliver content. They buy Blockbuster-branded T-shirts, pick up souvenir membership cards and browse for movies at the last Blockbuster on Earth. Shopping at a video store — once a mundane feature of everyday life — is now a retro novelty experience.
There seems to be more going on than people viewing the last Blockbuster as a sort of living history museum such as the hypothetical museum people have suggested to Tisher that he turn his store into or an anachronistic joke. Blockbuster consolidated, scaled and corporatized much of the video rental world that started as a cottage industry, an organic experiment run by mom and pops. Just like the early video store owners, my fellow clerks and I were there because we liked movies.
We were geeks. Many of us harbored secret or not-so-secret fantasies of becoming the next Quentin Tarantino, who famously worked in a video store before becoming a wildly admired filmmaker.
Our stores, after the main rush of a Friday or Saturday, often had the feel of a neighborhood bar. We would play music or movies rated above PG through the AV system, which was supposed to play nonstop corporate promos. Customers lingered at the checkout counter longer to talk about movies, which usually turned into conversations about other things.
On our off-duty days, we often showed up at late hours, half-drunk with friends, or alone, ostensibly to rent a free movie but usually sticking around for an hour or more to chat up our coworkers — who tended to also be friends, at every store I worked at — and customers.
At the end of the day, I think this was the underlying value of Blockbuster and the video rental industry writ large. Initiatives flowed out from centralized franchise and corporate authorities. Like a lot of chain retailers, corporate tried to script conversations with customers. If they knew we were playing music at night or heard some of our more freewheeling conversations with customers, our corporate supervisors probably would have had paroxysms. And while Silicon Valley magnates and their admirers might trot out those well-worn stage coach driver and railroad porter analogies, we are missing more than an outdated method of content distribution with Blockbuster gone.
Greenberg pointed to public libraries, as well as Alamo Drafthouse — which has performed the strange feat of opening video stores in — as modern movie culture hubs. There is also a surviving rental chain in Family Video , which launched its video arm in and today has around locations centered largely in the Midwest.
Nothing, however, is anywhere near as ubiquitous as the major video chains once were. What replaced them is largely algorithmic: good for getting content to your brain and anticipating what you are likely to like. But algorithms are fundamentally bad at challenging tastes or expanding them.
Or recommending, amid a winding conversation, a completely different genre or even medium a book, an album, a pub , as frequently happened at Blockbuster. We are missing a social node, a movie-obsessed hub, a cauldron where frontline workers with latent talent and ambition simmered, being around things and people that lit up their imagination and vice versa.
It replaces the video store with something social, rather than purely technological. The problem is: social dynamics and genuine human connections are hard to measure and harder, if not impossible, to control.
Relationships get passing lip service in the industry, but I have never heard a retail CEO trumpet the value of idle banter between store-level employees and customers in an earnings call. The growing void is not limited to movies. Technology is, more and more, reducing retail friction points, and with it the work humans used to do. In some cases the human may be the friction point.
At around 5 p. I went to work at the video store thinking no customers would be there. Everyone, I assumed, would be rooted in their living rooms, eyes plastered to the news, waiting for the next bit of information to come through, for someone to satisfyingly explain what just happened, and when war would start and with whom.
I was wrong. The store was nearly as busy as a weekend night. And weekend nights at the store I worked in then — tucked into a corridor of fast-food restaurants and gas stations near a major highway interchange in Columbia, Missouri — were crazily, impossibly busy. At least one customer that night, a middle-aged man with a sad smile, said he came to the store to get away from the news, to take a break. I wondered if they came to the store because It was just another night, and watching videos was what they did with their nights.
I remember being irritated, even angry, by the foot traffic in the store. By mid-shift, that feeling was gone. I was glad to be pulled away, to be around people, to be at the store. I had assumed everyone was there for the movie they would go sit in front of later. But I have to think — given my own relief — that a lot of them came for more than the videos. They also wanted to be around people on that day, in a friendly place.
They wanted to be out, in the world. And at the time, the world very much included Blockbuster. Stores have always evolved in order to compete as times, technology and tastes change. And, most of all, to please customers. Things are much better in the industry than in recent years. Retail will always be a tough business, though. Topics covered: retail tech, e-commerce, in-store operations, marketing, and more. Search x. Who really killed Blockbuster? With one store left in the world, the video retailer's approaching extinction is a reminder of all the things that can go wrong in retail.
By Ben Unglesbee. Unmanageable debt, shallow consumer knowledge, unsophisticated pricing — the video retailer's bumpy path to liquidation has a familiar ring to it. Back story. Act 1: Blockbuster enters. Timeline of Blockbuster.
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