Blockbuster Video Now Has Just One Store Left On Earth (apnews.com)

Cutting_Crew writes: After the last remaining Blockbuster Video store closed in Australia on March 31st, there is only one remaining left on earth. That location is in Bend, Oregon and seems to be a thriving location, where they write out membership cards by hand and the system is rebooted using floppy disks, apparently only something one person, the general manager, knows how to do. If you are wondering how there could be still blockbuster videos open since they went bankrupt back in 2010, the remaining stores left open were independent franchises and were separate from most of the other corporate stores, thus not part of the bankruptcy. There was also an Onion video before they even went bankrupt that's pretty funny. I remember getting a membership way back in late 90s and new releases were $8 per night. Even then, that seemed way too expensive. What are your most memorable (good or bad) memories of your local blockbuster?

Comments

I wish there were more video stores

[DogDude]

I miss video stores. I miss them almost daily. Streaming has no selection at all. Netflix's DVD service isn't bad, but it takes a week or so to get something that I want to see. I miss being able to get a pizza and a movie to watch over dinner. I have a huge video collection at home, but getting new stuff is still a PITA (order through Netflix DVD).

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[Bluecobra]

Check and see if there's a Family Video near you, they're still thriving.

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[CohibaVancouver]

I miss being able to get a pizza and a movie to watch over dinner.

We haven't "cut the cable" (I'm 52) so in our household we just press the "On Demand" button on our remote and rent the movie from the Cable TV Company.

If you don't have cable, you can also rent most any movie from Google Play Movies & TV or iTunes (either via streaming or a download that expires at the end of the rental period).

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[lactose99]

I miss waltzing through Tower Records every other Sunday, just browsing the acid jazz and downtemp sections, spending my afternoon listening to a dozen CDs and then buying half of 'em.

Granted it is more convenient to just hit the Amazon MP3 app at any time, the feeling of walking around the store is unmatched.

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[Anonymous Coward]

Decades ago I took a date to Tower Records. Dinner and perusing Tower Records. That was the date. I bought her a CD of Phil Collin's Hello I Must Be Going as a gift. I married her, and the CD is still in our collection, so it all worked out OK.

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt half the magic was hearing good music in the 90s.
I remember when I was a kid I put a blank tape in the radio by my BBS computer and it took over a week to catch them playing Nirvana's Heart Shaped Box even though it was the hot shit of the moment.
It didn't stop them from "This is K-RADIO-STATION MUSIC: *best 3 seconds of good song*... *best 3 seconds of good song*...*best 3 seconds of good song*... kicking off another 30 minute ad-free ROCK-BLOCK!!!! .. *shit music for an hour*

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[DarkOx]

I doubt very much any physical video rental store ever had a selection available as large as Netflix streaming. The truth is your memory is faulty. Even if you exclude the giant portion of Netfilx's streaming library that is stuff that I doubt anyone anywhere ever watches is a given year they still have more selection than your old video store.

What you are actually experiencing is the paradox of choice. See with NFLX you have yet to make much investment in watching anything until you do it. The main thing its going to cost you is your time. So first you experience disappointment when the hot new release inst available yet and then you agonize over the other options because none seem good enough and their are so many to consider...

Now consider the video store; you had already invested in a trip over there. Realistically you had to pick something or you were already out a bunch of time, gas, etc. Maybe you were lucky and got that new release you were excited about along the outside walls or maybe they were all checked out - remember that was thing - and you picked something from the stacks. Choosing from the stacks still only took 20min or so tops because there really was not that much to look thru at all once you eliminated a few sections like childrens.

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[Anubis IV]

I miss video stores. I miss them almost daily. Streaming has no selection at all.

Quite the contrary. In order of film selection size, from least to greatest (based on the latest numbers I could find in a quick search), here's how the various services stack up (unless otherwise noted, all of the below are streaming services):

Blockbuster (retail): 500-1K*
HBO: 815
Hulu: 2.3K
Netflix: 3.8K
Amazon Prime: 17.5K
Vudu: 18K
Redbox On Demand: 20K**
iTunes Store: 65K
Netflix (DVD): Over 100K

Even if you're doing the apples-to-oranges comparison of Netflix subscription vs. video store rentals, Netflix has the better selection by a wide margin, but once you start comparing today's video rental streaming services against the video store rental services of yesteryear, you're talking about orders of magnitude more films being available today. Not only that, but you can instantly rent a movie from any of the aforementioned services for less than the cost that you were paying at Blockbuster 20 years ago, which just goes to show how horrible the situation back then really was.

* You may see mention of Blockbuster stores having 8,000-10,000 films. That's either the 9,000-ish that their now-defunct streaming service had or the number of cassettes/discs they had in inventory (most of which would have been in the stacks of new releases that lined the walls of every store), not the number of unique titles to choose from. The numbers in the list above reflect the best estimates I could find for the actual number of unique titles available at any given store.

** The only numbers I could find were 7K at launch (i.e. several years ago) and 20K as an estimate provided by an executive for what they expected to have in their catalog by the middle of 2018. I went with 20K, since I figure it's closest to the actual number, but I wanted to be sure to disclose that uncertainty.

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[rtb61]

Well for $9 per month you can stream a whole bunch more, so yeah, Google, 'The rent is too damn high'. Honestly I do my content a year after, always playing catch up and avoiding the crap. Most of the best content is pre-nineties, content just ain't good enough any more to justify the price, so people don't care as much, watch it when it comes out or a year latter, who cares. Seriously for five dollars, with no packing or hardware and with an unknown life for the supplier, $5 is the buy and not the rent price, rent $1 pretty much it.

Re:I wish there were more video stores

[Anubis IV]

C. I'm a member of Netflix's DVD service. It's not nearly as bad as their streaming selection, but it's not great, either. A sample of the DVD's I'd like to get but they have permanently unavailable: "Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)", "Gung Ho (1986)", "Flash Gordon (1980)", "Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996)". My video store had all of these. If they didn't have something, they'd buy it so that I could rent it.

Again, you’re comparing apples and oranges. Netflix isn’t a rental service. They aren’t selling access to a deep and comprehensive catalog. It’s instead supposed to have an ever-churning supply of entertainment for a subscription fee, most of which you won’t care for, but enough of which you’ll like at any given time to make it worth your while. But if you look at actual rental services...
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978): available to rent for $2.99
- Gung Ho (1986): available to rent for $2.99
- Flash Gordon (1980): admittedly not available to rent, but you can buy it for just $8.99
- Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996): available for free on YouTube

I obviously can’t speak towards the particulars of your local video store, but I can say with certainty that there’s no way its catalog was anywhere near as deep or had nearly as many high quality movies as what you can find today via streaming. Even if 90% of iTunes’ content happened to be crap, that’d still be 6.5K high quality films, which is more than you could actually display in any retail setting.

There were better options

[plazman30]

I grew up in Philadelphia and we had a chain of video rental stores around here called West Coast Video. When Blockbuster came around, WCV really stepped up their game with more foreign and rare stuff you couldn't get from Blockbuster. I ended up going there more than Blockbuster.

Then I discovered Movies Unlimited, another store that catered to more obscure stuff. They even rented Laser Discs!

But I do miss video rental stores daily. I think they were great. Some cheese steaks and a DVD from West Coast Video made for a nice cheap date at home.

Re:They let someone else use our account one time

[spywhere]

File this under "wow, no wonder this guy posted as Anonymous Coward."

On Earth???

[Blinkin1200]

That tells me there may be more stores 'out there' some place and we just haven't found them yet.

First sentence? Editors?

[LynnwoodRooster]

After the last remaining Blockbuster Video store closed in Australia on March 31st, there is only one remaining left on earth.

Was it the last remaining Blockbuster Video or not? If there is still one remaining, then the one closed on Australia was the next to last remaining Blockbuster store...

I realized they jumped the sahrk

[Registered Coward v2]

When they offered a cheap DVD by mail plan where you could also turn in the DVDs at the store and exchange them for a free rental. I could get a 3 or 4 movies a week that way; and my spend at the local store was $0.

Re:They let someone else use our account one time

[flink]

Similar late fee problem here -- except it was for a movie that had been rented (and forgotten). Returned it weeks before and finally wanted a new rental. The late fees came to something like $96. I laughed at them and offered to buy the movie instead ($40 range). They declined. They wanted their ridiculous late fees.

They're not charging you for the price of the physical DVD. They are charging you for the lost revenue they could have been making renting it out to others while you were holding on to it. If they only expected to make $40 per copy of a movie, of course they would go out of business (sooner than they did) - they aren't even covering their overhead at that point. Every rental business is predicated on making more than the cost of the item back by charging more than it is worth if you had bought it outright.

Re:They let someone else use our account one time

[DarkOx]

So let me tell how your cool story actually reads:

Similar late fee problem here -- except it was for a movie that had been rented (and forgotten). Returned it weeks before and finally wanted a new rental

I was irresponsible and failed to honor my obligations as set forth in the rental agreement. I put my late return in the box and hoped I'd get away with it. Even though I really should have known better; because its not like they don't track these things..

The late fees came to something like $96. I laughed at them and offered to buy the movie instead ($40 range). They declined. They wanted their ridiculous late fees.

I don't understand anything about how the licensing works for commercial video rental media or the profit model the video rental industry operated on at the time. My ignorance is so cool right guys?

The conversation got a bit heated (me :) and they reminded me they had my credit card on file and would just charge it anyway.

I threw a tantrum but the clerk in the store remained clam and did his job like a professional.

I declined. Excused myself to "think about it" and go find another movie to rent (not). Went to the back of the store, called the bank, and cancelled the card in question.

Rather than accept and pay the debt I legitimately incurred; I moved to skip out on the bill. Also I stupid because the fact is they still have my name and address and they could easily slam my credit and send the debt to collections. Which would and very well may have cost me a lot more than $96 in long run..

Handed them my non-rentals on the way out the door (why should I put them back?). Let them know as I was passing to go ahead and close the account and "good luck" getting any charges through. They were bankrupt within a year.

I continued to behave like a dick, and probably only avoided debt collections and negative credit report issues because the company was already struggling and probably short staffed. Thanks at least in a very small part to my shitty behavior a business owner lost their franchise. Yeah! me!