The Blockbuster Chronicles - The Epilogue

Most of these stories have focused on my time as a Blockbuster employee during the early 2000s, but I knew the store long before someone handed me a blue polo shirt. Throughout the nineties, and occasionally during the company's final years, I experienced Blockbuster from the other side of the counter.

When I think about my childhood, I probably spent more time inside video stores than almost anywhere else. I visited arcades, comic shops, and movie theaters, but video stores gave me my real education in movies. Every shelf offered another genre, another actor, or another strange piece of cover art that suggested an entire world inside a plastic case.

Our visits usually followed one of two patterns. On weekends, my father took my brother and me to the store, and we spent an hour wandering the aisles while he chose new releases and we searched for older movies or video games. Other times, he dropped me off, ran errands, and returned a few hours later.

Nobody would leave a child unattended inside a streaming service, but the video store acted as its own temporary ecosystem. I was surrounded by employees, families, and rows of movies. There were worse places for a kid to disappear for an afternoon.

I wore down the carpet in more than one store. I circled the aisles repeatedly, reading every interesting box and struggling to make a decision. Renting a movie meant committing to it, and I treated that responsibility with the seriousness of someone selecting a college major. Even now, I can recognize certain films from a small fragment of their box art.

Whether we used Blockbuster depended on where we lived. Independent video stores were usually cheaper and offered better specials, although their collections could be smaller and less predictable. We rented from stores attached to grocery markets, tanning salons, and other businesses that had discovered a spare room could be filled with VHS tapes. If we wanted a major new release, or if the town had few independent stores, we went to Blockbuster.

One of my favorite memories began with James Bond.

I have always become obsessive when a subject captures my attention. I do not merely watch one movie. I begin a research project that consumes every available entry. When GoldenEye was approaching theaters, I decided I needed to experience the entire James Bond series.

For about a month, my father took me to Blockbuster every few days. I rented three or four Bond movies, watched them, and copied them onto blank tapes so I could revisit them later. Then we returned the stack and repeated the process until I had exhausted everything the store carried. These rentals came in addition to our normal weekly selections, so our account was extremely active.

Without realizing it, we qualified for Blockbuster's Gold membership. The program was not heavily advertised and seemed designed to reward the store's most frequent customers. We received a gold card and matching key tag that looked considerably more impressive than the standard membership card. The account also included benefits such as placing movies on hold and receiving a free older rental with a new release.

For a twelve year old, this felt like being granted access to an financial institution whose primary currency was James Bond tapes.

We also received an invitation to an advance screening of Jumanji. I had rented enough movies to earn a special membership and see a major release before the general public. That was serious status.

Blockbuster was more expensive than many independent stores, and its employees had less freedom to forgive late fees. My father could talk to anyone. At smaller stores, his personality often earned us waived charges, free rentals, or some unofficial customer loyalty benefit. Blockbuster operated through corporate rules, and charm had limited authority against the computer system.

In exchange, the stores were larger, brighter, and stocked with more copies. Sometimes they were too bright. For reasons I never understood, many locations placed either the children's movies or the video game section beside the windows receiving the strongest sunlight. The boxes faded until familiar characters looked like ghosts of themselves.

The video game displays created their own memories. When Nintendo introduced the Virtual Boy, Blockbuster locations received demo stations where customers could try it. I learned to choose my movie quickly so I could spend the rest of the visit staring into that glowing red machine and playing Mario's Tennis. The graphics assaulted my eyes, and I loved every minute.

Blockbuster later helped bring me back to console gaming. After owning a Sega Genesis, I became devoted to computer games. My desktop offered better graphics and games like Command & Conquer, so the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation seemed interesting but unnecessary.

Then professional wrestling took over my life, and WWF War Zone was announced.

The game featured wrestler entrances, theme music, and graphics that looked astonishingly realistic at the time. I needed it, but the game would not be available for my computer. I tried the PC version of WCW Nitro, which was terrible. My brother and I accepted that we needed a new console, but we could not decide between the PlayStation and Nintendo 64.

Fortunately, Blockbuster rented entire systems. Customers placed a deposit covering the console's value, usually around one hundred and fifty dollars, then paid roughly twenty dollars to take it home for a few days.

We rented the PlayStation first and were not impressed. Then we tried the Nintendo 64 and immediately knew which console we wanted. We returned the rental, gathered our older systems, and went to FuncoLand to trade everything toward an upgrade.

Ironically, WWF War Zone turned out to be disappointing. The Nintendo 64 still justified itself through GoldenEye 007 and Wave Race 64. Then my mother gave me WCW/nWo Revenge for Christmas, and I finally found the wrestling game I had imagined. WWF WrestleMania 2000 and WWF No Mercy followed, and for several years wrestling games became glorious.

By then, the home video business was changing.

Netflix and streaming receive most of the credit for killing Blockbuster, but the decline began earlier. During the VHS era, many movies were unavailable for purchase when they first reached rental stores. Some did not receive affordable retail editions for months or years. Renting was often the only practical way to watch them at home.

DVD altered that arrangement. Movies increasingly became available to purchase around the same time they arrived as rentals. Collectors and casual viewers could own a new release immediately. When a rental cost five dollars and a permanent copy cost only ten or fifteen dollars more, buying became tempting.

I adopted DVD quickly and began purchasing most movies I wanted to see. Buying an unknown movie carried some risk, but used media stores made it possible to resell DVDs and recover part of the cost. The act of building a collection began replacing the habit of renting.

After leaving Blockbuster in 2002, I did not rent another movie until 2004. Over a long weekend, I picked up Garden State and the first few discs of Dead Like Me. I returned them and did not enter another Blockbuster for three years.

I visited Hollywood Video more often, but usually to buy used DVDs and games rather than rent them. Its prices were excellent, and its selection catered more effectively to independent film fans. When Hollywood Video closed in 2010, I began visiting Blockbuster every few months to browse its used inventory. I rarely bought much. By then, video stores had become places I visited mainly to remember enjoying video stores.

In 2012, I assumed every Blockbuster had closed. Then I discovered one still operating in Fuquay Varina, a few towns away. Knowing it existed comforted me. I imagined that the company might survive in rural communities where a physical store could still offer something useful.

That hope ended on an overcast Sunday afternoon in January 2014.

I was driving past the Fuquay Varina store with my girlfriend, when I noticed the going out of business signs. She encouraged me to stop. The moment I entered, sadness washed over me.

The store had been gutted. Only scattered movies remained, and everything was for sale. Customers could buy fixtures, binders, packing tape, and boxes of plastic bags. It was the final day, and the store was no longer pretending there might be another customer tomorrow.

I left with roughly fifty movies for thirty dollars. I found several titles I had missed, including Trouble with the Curve and The Way, Way Back. One movie demanded to come home with me even though I already owned it.

A single copy of Be Kind Rewind sat alone on a nearly empty shelf.

I had to buy it.

Be Kind Rewind is a love letter to VHS, video stores, and the communities that formed around them. The store in the film is a small independent operation, the sort of place Blockbuster once helped push aside. Yet by 2014, the mighty corporation had been reduced to something similarly fragile. This final location was no longer an unstoppable chain. It was one neighborhood store trying to survive until the inventory disappeared.

I never felt sentimental about Blockbuster as a corporation. It paid employees poorly, enforced rigid policies, relied heavily on late fees, and behaved for years as though customers would never find a more convenient alternative. The company was slow to respond as buying DVDs, receiving movies by mail, using rental kiosks, and eventually streaming became easier.

The popular story that Netflix began because Reed Hastings received an enormous late fee has been repeated so often that it has become part of the mythology surrounding both companies. Whatever the precise origin, Netflix recognized a frustration Blockbuster had normalized. Movies could reach customers without due dates, late fees, or a trip to the store.

Blockbuster had opportunities to respond and failed to build a sustainable future. The same company that had overwhelmed many independent stores discovered that size and familiarity did not guarantee survival.

I sometimes wonder whether video stores might have lasted longer if Blockbuster had adapted earlier or treated its customers with more humility. Perhaps Redbox and streaming would have dismantled the model regardless. Technology made instant access inevitable, and nostalgia cannot reverse convenience.

Still, I wonder what was lost along the way.

Would we still have sarcastic clerks placing absurd titles on the Employee Picks shelf? Would people continue wandering the aisles without knowing what they wanted? Would a strange cover lead someone toward a movie an algorithm would never recommend?

For all my criticism of the company, my memories of Blockbuster remain warm. I loved working there, and I loved being a customer. Its shelves educated me about movies and gave my family countless hours of entertainment. The store turned choosing a film into an event rather than a preliminary step before watching one.

I miss entering a video store without an agenda. I miss judging movies by their boxes and being surprised by something I knew nothing about. Ratings, reviews, trailers, and audience scores now appear before we press Play. If a movie loses our attention, thousands of alternatives wait one click away.

Streaming made movies cheaper and immediately available. In exchange, we surrendered the hunt. We no longer had to make a choice, carry it home, and give it a fair chance because it was the only movie we had for the evening.

I helped cause that change. I bought DVDs instead of renting them. I embraced mail services and streaming. Convenience won because people like me chose it repeatedly. Only after the stores disappeared did I understand that the inconvenience had been part of the experience.

When I originally wrote this chapter, I imagined having children someday and taking them to Blockbuster on a Friday night. I pictured letting them wander the aisles and choose a movie on their own. That particular future was already impossible.

What I missed was not merely the plastic case or the blue and yellow sign. It was the shared ritual. A family left the house together, searched together, negotiated together, and returned home carrying one decision. The movie began before anyone inserted the tape.

Netflix could deliver the entertainment. It could not recreate the trip.

On the final day of that Fuquay Varina store, I walked through the remains of a place that had once seemed permanent. Then I carried Be Kind Rewind to the counter and bought one final memory from Blockbuster.

Sometimes you do not know what part of an experience mattered until it no longer exists.