My local Blockbuster was a curvy mass of floor-length windows and reflective metal siding—picture the squat, commercial creation of a lesser Frank Gehry—which seemed to have been dropped by a distracted urban planner into the middle of a parking lot in Laurel, Maryland. Across the street from an Exxon gas station and kitty-corner from Montgomery Ward, the building wasn’t connected to any mall of its own, and to me always felt out of place: a fluorescent retail anomaly, uncomfortable in its own space. But because it stood roughly halfway between my family’s house and synagogue, we made a habit of stopping in after Shabbat services on Friday nights to pick up a few movies for the weekend. My parents may have refused my sister and me the cable TV that was our greatest childhood desire, but once a week (twice, if someone had the flu) they would brave the video store’s long evening lines to replenish our dependable stack of VHS tapes, each of which came sheathed in a brittle plastic case, ribbed for easy gripping.
Previously, we’d belonged to Video Magic, a small independent outlet squeezed between a liquor store and a florist in its own undistinguished strip mall. Video Magic always seemed a permanent, if squalid, feature of my town’s commercial landscape. Its “new releases” may have comprised a single shelf of twenty films, some two or three years old, but other sections suggested a downright cinephilic curator. Most comprehensive was the horror section, in whose narrow aisles I keenly remember begging my parents to let me check out a copy of “Faces of Death”—the notorious pre-Internet mondo anthology of both real and convincingly staged car accidents, shootings, and decapitations—the complete series of which took up an entire shelf at Video Magic. As with cable TV, my arguments on the subject were futile.
Maybe “Faces of Death” was the last straw. Or the owner’s unwashed golden retrievers, which were always roaming the aisles unleashed. Or else it was the unsavory (and, for a ten-year-old, cruelly beguiling) curtained-off “Adults Only” room that caused my parents to slowly transition our rental habits from the indie to the dependably corporatized. Though we never made a clean break with Video Magic, once Blockbuster opened, we found ourselves more and more often beneath the blue and yellow ticket stub on Friday nights. The indie store shuttered a few years later, its space subsumed by the adjacent liquor palace.
History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, to borrow a line often attributed to Mark Twain. On Wednesday, Dish Network announced that Blockbuster’s three hundred remaining U.S. retail stores will close. For most stores, the final day to rent is Saturday, after which their stock will be slowly liquidated in anticipation of final closings in early 2014. The company’s Netflix-like DVD mailing service, Blockbuster By Mail, will shutter in December.
“This is not an easy decision,” Dish C.E.O. Joseph P. Clayton said in a press release, “yet consumer demand is clearly moving to digital distribution of video entertainment.” (Dish has owned Blockbuster since April of 2011, when it bought the company at a Chapter 11 bankruptcy auction.) Though the physical stores are closing, Dish will continue to operate the fifteen movie channels that make up Blockbuster @Home for Dish customers, as well as the limited offerings from Blockbuster on Demand, in an effort to wrench whatever benefit it can from the store’s brand recognition.
Still, the long-expected announcement seems to herald the end of the image of Blockbuster as retail behemoth, if not the death of the video store as commercial fixture. Online, the response to the news has been a collective “Whoa—are those still around?”
Blockbuster, founded in 1985 by a computer programmer named David Cook, is often said to have derived its early success from Cook’s novel inventory-tracking program, which allowed a store to rate the popularity of its older films and immediately check the availability of new releases. An individual Blockbuster store could thus optimize its speed of service and selection for customers based on which films were most sought (a tactic that became standard across many retail industries, and that Netflix would improve on years later with its data-driven user recommendations). In 1994, Viacom bought the company for eight billion dollars. In 2002, Blockbuster had more than eight thousand retail stores.
Yet its slow demise has been steady and, in hindsight, predictable. Viacom’s ill-guided attempt to expand the stores’ mission into retailing merchandise for Paramount and MTV was a disaster, and the company’s stock lost half its value. In 1998, the launch of Netflix marked the end of Blockbuster’s uncontested domination of the DVD-rental market, but, instead of responding with a mail service of its own, Blockbuster, under the guidance of its then-C.E.O., Jim Antioco, decided to refocus on brick-and-mortar stores. The company went bankrupt in 2010. By the time Dish took over, post-bankruptcy, only seventeen hundred U.S. stores remained, many of which closed by the end of 2011. Two years later, this final shuttering feels largely foretold.
It’s hard to muster much sympathy for Blockbuster’s ultimate fate—innocent retail employees excepted—in part because of the company’s own legacy as a “category killer” of mom-and-pop video stores across the country. The company’s sanitized, family-friendly retail experience and deep corporate pockets muscled independent stores out of operation, much as Barnes & Noble and Borders did to indie bookstores. Blockbuster’s own demise in the Internet age is a failure not of strength or influence, but of imagination. Time and again, the company’s higher-ups failed to recognize changes in the nature of the home-entertainment industry, as James Surowiecki reported in the magazine on the occasion of Blockbuster’s 2010 bankruptcy,
