In the least surprising news of all time, Blockbuster, Inc. is declaring bankruptcy. As of now all of the talk is about debt restructuring and the like, but this is clearly a company at death’s door. With Netflix and iTunes and (the still sort of mystifying to me) Redbox, we all knew this was coming for the better part of a decade, right?
This affects my life in absolutely no way, as far as I can tell. I don’t even know where my local Blockbuster is anymore, and certainly don’t have a membership or whatever it is they call it. Because I was completely indifferent, I was surprised to see so many others react to the news with such gleeful schadenfreude. If it isn’t the authors writing the articles, it’s the people commenting on them, who all seem to have some serious long-held late fee grudges.
The only time Blockbuster even enters my thoughts nowadays is when I don’t quite know what I want to watch and I’m frustratingly and unsuccessfully browsing through Netflix attempting to find something to stream. Either their user interface is just inadvertently terrible or they are purposefully burying things to control demand and limit delays. It always makes me ever-so-slightly nostalgic for the days when I would go into Blockbuster, head straight for the “A” section of the new releases, and scan titles from one side of the store to the other, often leaving with a few movies of which I hadn’t ever heard. That’s why I enjoyed this video box reminiscence over at Best Week Ever.
Image via Wikipedia
Oh, Blockbuster. When you do eventually disappear I certainly won’t miss you. But I did enjoy our time together.
Of Modern Proportions 
Greetings friend,
I hate Blockbuster, and not because I owe late fees. No, I hate Blockbuster because I used to work there. I only worked part time and did not really need the gig, so I was cool, but many of friends there were treated like dirt. They traded store managers often due to firings; it was a stressful environment. They were also nasty to their customers.
I have a netflix account and I love it. Who ever thought of that was brilliant. It’s all done online, no “real” customer interaction; I love it. I can definitely see why it is more appealing than the local video store chain.
Feel free to join the conversation about films at http://khocolatemoose.wordpress.com/
I’d love to hear what you think, and often.
Best,
KM
KM,
Yeah, I’ve heard many stories about Blockbuster being a bad place both to work and to shop, in addition to totally valid issues people have with the way they put independent video stores out of business, and the somewhat murky “family-friendly” approach they take to title selection. My clumsily made point was more that while I prefer Netflix and the way things are now, we might have lost a little something by no longer being able to do some in-store browsing.
Thanks for the comment, I’ll definitely check out your blog.