Once a week, as a kid, I used to spend an hour or two in the local video store, some twenty years ago. When my parents went for an extended vacation in Florida it was like I had died and gone to heaven. There was a massive Blockbuster video store in Ft. Lauderdale. When Dusk till Dawn came out it would have an entire wall of VHS' dedicated to its release, and even then, every tape was hired out. They also sold all kinds of candy, mircowavable popcorn, Haagen Daz and general movie related merchandise that, as a child, fascinated the hell out of the me. It was an impressive store and when Friday night came around it was the go to place. Its large neon sign was a beacon of salvation from having to watch some ad laden Ricky Lake crap on TV.
Time moved on and the internet started to get more interesting, but even downloading an image took ages, let alone watching a video. So the internet wasn't a place I was going to be watching much on, yet.
Although the internet did offer something pretty interesting. I found out I could rent all kinds of obscure, and unknown films I'd never seen, through Amazon's DVD by mail service. It was a big step up, no late fee's, a larger collection and it was generally cheaper. Although you had to be more voracious in your viewing habits to make it worth the subscription, which i was OK with.
Then, one sunny day, my Dad got broadband internet. And boy was I happy! Online gaming (Yahoo Pool XD), streaming, browsing, it was so cool.
And then, I don't know when it happened, sometime in the late 2000's, on a grey and rainy afternoon, my local blockbuster shut down. I later read somewhere that blockbuster had gone bankrupt and was to stop trading in the UK. I hadn't ventured through its doors for so long I cant remember exactly when I stopped visiting.
I had good memories about the ultra, super deluxe Blockbuster back in Florida. But my local store back in the UK kinda sucked.
Blockbuster started to slide just as other services, such as Netflix, came about. It got expensive, the stores were scruffy, and they kept trying to get me to buy "deals" at the checkout. As a customer, the whole experience started becoming a bit of a drag. I also had to rent a DVD for two nights, just so they could get more out of me. I only wanted it for one.
So it seemed to me, Blockbuster was making some bad decisions. At a time when the market was moving forward and innovative companies where evolving at a remarkable rate, Blockbuster was being left behind. Times where changing and fast.
Head Office must of realized the company was losing money and its market dominance. So the head honcho's did the easiest thing they could do. Up the prices and push the staff to try and sell more at checkout.
It wasn't a good strategy. Not trying to innovate and move with the times and simply make the customer pay for its shortfalls. Blockbuster even had the chance to buy Netflix early on for a cool $50 million, but the CEO at the time said this was too expensive for a small, niche company. Today Netflix has sales around $9 billion per year.
But I'm probably being too hard on Blockbuster. There was little it could do to compete with the advent of streaming services. Plus the fact that DVD's were being mass produced and sold cheaply online and in retail stores. Also independent video stores died out as well, so the business model itself was simply being made redundant by its many competitors.
And so Blockbuster sold all its DVD's cheap, laid off all its staff and closed its doors. The last DVD it ever rented was Seth Rogan's "This is the End" at its Hawaii store at 11pm on the 9 November, 2013.
Thanks for reading. Here's a cool video about the last Blockbuster Video found in Alaska. It's on Youtube and made by Vice.
