The Blockbuster Chronicles - Introduction

There was a time when watching a movie at home required considerably more effort than clicking an app and spending twenty minutes scrolling through thumbnails before deciding there was somehow nothing to watch.

In the early 1980s, the home video market exploded. For the first time, people could rent a copy of a movie, take it home, and watch it whenever they wanted. Today that sounds almost absurdly ordinary, but at the time it was revolutionary. Before VHS became commonplace, your options were pretty limited. You could see a movie while it was playing in a theater, wait for a television station to eventually air it, or simply accept that you might never see it again. Video stores changed all of that.

Small rental shops began appearing everywhere, stocking whatever tapes they could get their hands on. Horror movies, action movies, comedies, exercise videos, children's cartoons, instructional tapes and an endless supply of strange low-budget movies that seemed to exist primarily because somebody needed something to put on all those newly constructed shelves. Then Blockbuster showed up.

In 1985, David Cook opened the first Blockbuster Video in Dallas, Texas. Cook came from the computer and database world, and he approached video rental differently than many of the independent stores already operating. Inventory could be tracked. Customer habits could be studied. Stores could carry titles based on what people in that particular area were actually renting.

It was essentially Moneyball for video stores, except nobody had made Moneyball yet.

Blockbuster also understood one of the biggest frustrations of renting movies during the 1980s: finding the movie you actually wanted. A small neighborhood store might receive one or two copies of a major new release. If somebody got there before you on Friday night, you weren't watching it. You could put your name on a waiting list and hope for the best.

Blockbuster attacked that problem with volume. Instead of carrying only a couple of copies of a popular movie, stores might carry fifteen or twenty. They built deep catalogs of older movies while dedicating huge sections of the store to new releases. Eventually Blockbuster expanded into video-game rentals as well, giving families another reason to walk through those blue-and-yellow doors and the formula worked. By the 1990s, Blockbuster was everywhere.

At its peak, the company operated thousands of stores around the world and employed tens of thousands of people. It was the Walmart of video rental. The stores were bigger and brighter than many of the neighborhood shops they replaced, although they weren't necessarily more interesting. Independent stores often had obscure horror films, imports, weird cult movies and shelves full of things you had never heard of. Blockbuster preferred movies it knew people would rent.

It was corporate. Very corporate.

There were membership cards, late fees, rental periods, sales goals, promotional displays, mandatory greetings and carefully planned shelves designed by people hundreds of miles away from the stores themselves. And for a while, it seemed unstoppable.

DVDs arrived and Netflix began mailing movies directly to people's homes. High-speed Internet became common. Streaming went from a novelty to something millions of people used every night. The very idea that had made Blockbuster revolutionary, getting movies into people's homes conveniently, was eventually accomplished without requiring anyone to drive to a store at all.

By 2014, the remaining company-owned Blockbuster stores in the United States had closed. A business that had once seemed like a permanent fixture of American life disappeared astonishingly fast.

That's the strange thing about Blockbuster now. It feels ancient, yet it isn't.

For millions of people, Friday night once meant getting into a car, driving to a video store, wandering around for half an hour, arguing over what movie everyone wanted to watch, finally reaching some sort of compromise and then grabbing snacks on the way home. Video stores weren't simply places where movies were stored. They were part of the ritual.

And for twenty-three months, one of them was also where I worked. From February 2001 until December 2002, I was an employee at the Blockbuster Video in Millington, Tennessee.

It was my first job. It was also, depending on the night, a crappy job, a hilarious job, a frustrating job and one of the most important experiences of my teenage years.

At seventeen, I didn't understand any of that. I was mostly interested in earning some money to pre-order an Xbox, watching movies and surviving my shift without being asked to clean something disgusting.

But Blockbuster became my introduction to a world outside my family and school. Suddenly I was working alongside people who were older than me, younger than me, smarter than me, stranger than me and sometimes spectacularly irresponsible. I dealt with customers who were wonderful and customers who seemed personally offended by the existence of late fees. I learned how to work. I learned how not to work. I made friends. I embarrassed myself. I behaved like an idiot. Basically, I was a teenager.

We rarely understand the importance of a period of our lives while we're actually living through it. At the time, Blockbuster was simply where I had to go after school. Looking back, I can see how much growing up happened amongst all those movie boxes.

That's what The Blockbuster Chronicles is about. Not really the rise and fall of Blockbuster Video. Plenty of people have already told that story. This is the story of one Blockbuster store in Millington, Tennessee, during the last few years when video stores still felt like they were going to be around forever.

More specifically, it's the story of the dumb teenager who worked there.