The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 4: Moving Up

Our Blockbuster was located in a dying shopping center. There was a Cato nearby, but it did not exactly inspire crowds of eager shoppers. When a new retail space opened directly in front of Walmart, Blockbuster jumped at the opportunity to move somewhere with actual traffic.

We relocated during the winter of 2001. In a plan that was equal parts cheap and ingenious, Blockbuster convinced our customers to move most of the inventory for us. During the week before the move, every movie rented for ninety nine cents and was due one week later at the new location. Customers carried roughly sixty percent of our movies out of the old store and returned them to the new one without ever realizing they had become unpaid members of the moving crew.

Everything that remained was left to the employees. We spent the week boxing equipment and sealing stacks of merchandise with the shrink wrap machine. Once the old store was packed, we loaded everything into a truck and drove it two miles down the road.

We complained about performing manual labor for five dollars and thirty-five cents an hour, but the move itself was surprisingly enjoyable. There were no customers to interrupt us, which gave everyone plenty of time to joke around between trips to the truck. The entire staff worked together that night, and the company provided free pizza. At seventeen, free pizza could redeem almost any labor violation.

Much of the new store had already been assembled by the time we arrived. The counters and break room were finished, along with rows of black wire racks that would soon become the enemy of anyone trying to browse without bumping into another person. We only had to unload the movies, arrange them in the correct sections, label everything, and prepare to reopen.

The better location came at a cost. The new store was about one fourth the size of the old one. Our wide aisles and wooden shelves disappeared, replaced by a cramped maze of wire racks with little room for movies and even less room for customers. To make everything fit, we sold a large part of the older inventory.

That disappointed me more than anything else about the move. Working at the old store had given me an unexpected education in strange cult films and overlooked movies from the seventies and eighties. I had access to titles I had never encountered at school, at home, or through whatever happened to be playing on cable. Now many of them were sacrificed so we could squeeze more copies of the newest releases into a smaller building in front of Walmart.

Fortunately, the Video Barn down the road still carried many of those older movies. Every so often, I would betray my employer and pay another video store to rent something Blockbuster had decided was no longer worth the shelf space.

The new store sat beside a Popeyes, which quickly became our unofficial cafeteria. We ate there constantly and got to know the employees. Before long, the two staffs developed an unauthorized exchange program. We gave them free movie rentals, and they gave us free meals. Nobody in management had approved the arrangement, but it kept us entertained, kept them fed with movies, and kept all of us slightly fatter. As far as we were concerned, it was a perfect economic system.

Around my birthday in November 2001, Robert received orders transferring him to a new base and submitted his notice. His departure created an opening for a third key, and with Lori and Kelly lobbying on my behalf, I was finally promoted. I was still in high school for another month, which made the decision controversial, but upper management eventually approved it.

Kelly was thrilled. She and Lori had been arguing for my promotion for months, but neither had been able to convince Deloris. According to Kelly, Robert had recommended me on his way out, and his endorsement finally settled the matter.

Robert was a man of few words and apparently even fewer friends. The fact that he spoke up for me carried weight. I never had the opportunity to thank him, which is something I regret. For all his faults, he had noticed how hard I worked and used his final bit of influence at the store to help me.

I took the promotion seriously. I wanted to become the most dependable manager in the building, the person everyone trusted to do things correctly. I maintained that reputation, although I also found plenty of opportunities to have fun when Deloris was not around. Those stories can wait.

One of my new responsibilities was attending the monthly inventory. After the store closed, two or three of us remained behind to scan every item in the building. The handheld scanners were attached to cords nearly two hundred feet long, and the computer system was placed into inventory mode. Then we worked through the store one section at a time, scanning everything from video game consoles to the bags of pickles near the register.

The process originally took about three hours. By the end of my time at Blockbuster, we had reduced it to roughly ninety minutes. Once the final item was scanned, the printer produced a massive stack of paper comparing what we had counted with what the system believed should be there. In practical terms, the report told us what customers had stolen.

Our two most frequently stolen movies were Scarface and Mallrats. We could not keep either one on the shelf.

When I eventually took over special orders, I began ordering a new copy of Scarface almost every month. By the time the replacement arrived, the previous copy would be gone. Then the VHS edition went out of print before the movie had been released on DVD, leaving us unable to replace it. For about six months, we disappointed a steady procession of Al Pacino fans.

By then I had gone from the kid emptying the return box to a manager trusted with keys, cash, inventory, and special orders. The promotion did not make me an adult, no matter how much I wanted it to. It mostly gave me a better view of how strange the adults on both sides of the counter could be.