There's just no demand for it anymore. On the ever rarer occasion people rent physical media, they can go to a RedBox, or find a local Mom & Pop video store.
There was one summer I moved back home from college and worked overnight at Walmart. There was a Blockbuster right in front of the store and for $20 I got unlimited two at a time rentals. That was in 2004. I was introduced to Netflix in 2005 and never used the service again.
I thought local video stores had gone extinct long ago because of chains like Blockbuster. The thing about Netflix is, it doesn't always have the exact same selection that Blockbuster did, and you have to wait to get DVDs. Blockbuster was good to have around as a supplement, an alternative source that could occasionally provide titles Netflix lacked or at least make them available immediately instead of days later.
Oh I know, it's been a long time coming and it's not as if they didn't bring it on themselves it's just sad to a see the end of an era kind of a thing, I was a kid when they opened their first stores and they were a great place to go at one point. It's also sad to see that many more people added to the unemployment pool.
Where I live there are still 2 Family Videos that are open. I never go there, but each has a Little Caesar's connected to it, which I do go to every now and then. The stores seem to be doing at least decent business as far as I can see. The 2 Blockbusters we had were closed years ago, so it's kind of nice to see Family Video hanging in there.
Sorry to hear that people will be losing their jobs, but Blockbuster was a horrible company with terrible customer service and awful business practices. I haven't been a customer since about 2001. Good riddence.
This. They were a horribly run company with awful service, and had a reputation for screwing over its customers. Good riddance, indeed. I honestly thought that they had already gone extinct.
Up until about a year ago I still had three within a 10 minute drive from my house. One was turned into a Dental Practice about a year ago, one is now a tanning salon, and the third is still Blockbuster. At least for now.
I agree, it is the end of an era. I worked for Hollywood Video back in the day, right as DVDs were becoming a thing. Still, 95% of our inventory were VHS tapes, and I remember running our half dozen rewinders (thanks people!), opening and splicing broken videotapes, and asking people if they wanted to pay on their late fees (the biggest late fee I ever saw was a $95 late fee for one VHS tape). It was a neat experience.
That brings back memories. I used to work at Movie Gallery. At our store you paid the 'extended viewing fee' or you didn't rent anything else. I got so good at splicing videotapes that I had customers bringing in their personal tapes for me to fix.
Nice. Yeah, we had people who were flagged as not being able to rent, but then they'd bring in their friends, who would pay for the video, and then hand it right to them. Our manager didn't care.
I remember when movies would first come out on VHS as rent-only and then later on you could buy them retail. Although you could special order them for around $100 to get a title at the same time the rental stores got them if you really wanted it that badly. I wonder if that's how much the rental stores had to buy them for.
I miss video stores. I'd stumble across a lot of good movies just wandering the isles. All the new movies are on my cable on demand but never any good older ones.
A local video store I used to frequent (very much hole-in-the-wall), told me as much. Of course, they also told me they didn't buy them from the catalogs. Instead, they would just go to the store and buy them off the shelf. It seemed to work out well for them for a few years, but then one day they just shut down. I always wondered whether it was because they were cheating the system. Yeah, part of the fun was browsing. The lists available on demand are pretty nice, but it also allows for more junk as filler. In a video store, shelf space was at a premium, so the video was usually something decent (though not always).
Aside from over charging and some really thoughtless public relation issues, I wonder what did they do to "bring it upon themselves". Surely they did not start as a company in that state.