The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 1: My First Job

Most teenagers are excited to get their driver’s license. I wasn’t. As far as I could tell, a license was simply the first step in an elaborate trap. A license meant driving, driving meant gas and insurance, and gas and insurance meant getting a job. I was perfectly content staying home, watching old horror movies, and spending my free time online. Then Microsoft introduced the Xbox.

The presentation featured The Rock standing beside Bill Gates, looking as if he might give him the People’s Elbow if the console failed to meet expectations. Suddenly, employment didn’t seem quite so objectionable. I called EB Games to ask about preorders and learned they were offering a package for $499.99 that included the console, an extra controller, and three games. Five hundred dollars might as well have been five thousand to a teenager without a job, but I wanted that Xbox. In February 2001, motivated entirely by consumer electronics, I entered the workforce.

Thankfully, finding a job didn’t require much effort. Shortly after announcing my intention of finding employment, my father and I made our usual stop at Blockbuster. While we were there, he struck up a conversation with Deloris, the store manager, about whether she needed any part-time help. She was a friendly woman, and after a brief introduction, she invited me back for an interview. A few days later, I had my first job interview. By the following weekend, I was reporting for my first shift.

I hadn’t given much thought to where I wanted to work, but looking back, I couldn’t have found a better place. I loved movies, I already loved going to the video store, and this particular Blockbuster was only a few minutes from my house. They were also willing to schedule my shifts around school, which was important since I still needed to graduate before beginning what I assumed would be a long and distinguished career playing Halo. 

My first shifts consisted almost entirely of grunt work. As soon as I arrived, I was shown how to empty the return drop box outside the building. Customers pushed their VHS tapes and DVDs through a narrow metal slot, and the movies landed in a foam-lined cabinet on the other side. I pulled everything out and carried it inside, where I checked each VHS tape to see whether it had been rewound. If it hadn’t, I placed it in one of the rewind machines. If it had, I put it on the counter to be scanned back into the computer system.

Once the movies were checked in, they were placed on a ledge behind the counter. Observant customers knew to hover nearby when they were waiting for a popular new release. They watched that ledge with the quiet intensity of vultures circling an injured animal, ready to pounce the moment a copy of Meet the Parents became available.

When everything had been checked in, I sorted the returns by category and alphabetized the titles before carrying them back to the shelves. Then I checked the return slot inside the store and repeated the entire process. This cycle continued throughout the shift. If there were no movies waiting to be checked in, I walked the floor, straightened cases, helped customers find titles, and picked up whatever trash they had left behind. 

After a few days, I was introduced to another important responsibility: preparing the display boxes for new VHS releases. Rental tapes arrived sealed in the same cardboard packaging you would find at a retail store. We sliced open the plastic with a box cutter, removed the tape, and secured it inside a sturdy Blockbuster case with a preprinted insert containing the cover art, title, synopsis, and barcode.

That left us with the original cardboard box, which Blockbuster used as a display copy on the shelf. Since an empty box would collapse almost immediately, we took it into the back room and filled it with a precut piece of styrofoam. Then we wrapped the box in plastic using a shrink-wrap machine that looked like a paper cutter designed by someone with a mild interest in industrial accidents. Instead of a blade, it had a hot wire that cut and sealed the plastic.

We pulled the plastic from a large roll on the side of the machine, wrapped it around the box, and pressed the wire down until the edges were sealed. After that, we used a heat gun, essentially a hair dryer capable of removing skin, to shrink the plastic tightly around the package. The process kept the styrofoam inside and made the box look almost like a brand-new retail copy.

It was tedious work, and after a while the smell of heated plastic became tiresome, but it had one major advantage: nobody bothered you while you were doing it. On days when I wasn’t feeling particularly social, I could disappear into the back room with a stack of boxes and pretend shrink-wrapping was a highly specialized profession requiring my complete concentration.

Once you proved you could handle the less appealing parts of the job, including cleaning the bathrooms, taking out the trash, and retrieving movies from the drive-through return box, you were eventually allowed to work behind the register. For most employees, that was the place to be. There were usually at least two of us gathered around the counter, and depending on who you were working with, it could be a lot of fun. 

The computer system was primitive, even by 2001 standards, but it was easy enough to use. We scanned membership cards, rented movies, collected late fees, and tried not to react when customers became personally offended by charges they had accumulated by keeping The Perfect Storm for eleven days. During the slower stretches, we stood around talking about movies, girls, life, and whatever else seemed important to us at the time.

There was always work available if you went looking for it. On weekday shifts, we printed the cover sheets that went inside the plastic cases for new releases, placed price stickers on movies being sold, and pulled older titles from the shelves when they were no longer renting well. Those tapes and DVDs were marked as previously viewed, shrinkwrapped, and priced for sale.

There were cardboard standees to assemble, DVDs and video games to secure inside locking cases, and rental VCRs and game systems to clean. If you were truly desperate for something to do, you could always visit the children’s section. It didn’t matter what time of day it was or how recently someone had straightened it. The children’s section was always a disaster. Toddlers apparently approached video stores with the same philosophy Vikings once brought to coastal villages.

My first few weeks were quiet. I was shy, so I mostly kept to myself, followed instructions, and tried to do a good job. I enjoyed being surrounded by movies, and even the repetitive tasks had a comforting rhythm. For the most part, I came in, worked my shift, and went home without saying much to anyone.

That began to change during one slow weekend shift, when I made my first real friend at work.

Her name was Megan.