A reader reflects:
I worked at a Blockbuster for about three years, starting in high school and continuing when I was in college. As a budding filmmaker and rabid cinephile, it was pretty much the perfect job for me. Sure, the pay sucked, but the bottom line was I was being paid to indulge in my number one passion.
Blockbuster had an inventory management system whereby if a particular video had not been checked out within the past year, it would get flagged by the system for resale. We’d actually take the video off the shelf, price it, and put it in the used video sale bin. As a movielover, this greatly upset me. So I made it my mission to look up movies that I cared about and check them out under my employee account if they were in danger of being weeded. David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders owe me big time. (Here’s a post I wrote about one of my encounters as a Blockbuster employee.)
Another was there at the beginning:
The recent announcement of the closure of Blockbuster brought back some fond memories for me. I worked at the original Blockbuster in Dallas – the Medallion Store, as we called it (it was located in a strip mall that was then known as the Medallion Center).
I’m sure Jason Bailey’s descriptions of know-nothing employees is accurate, but not in the beginning, certainly not at Medallion. We knew our stuff. I suppose the difference between my 1985 Blockbuster experience and Jason Bailey’s was that, in 1985, we still were a mom-and-pop enterprise. I think by the time I left the store for the real world, there were still only seven stores. And we had employees who loved movies.
We had SMU film majors like Todd, who would occasionally answer the phone in character (Jack Nicholson: “Blockbuster Video, what the hell do you want?”). We had working local actors and actresses like Laurel, keeping a day job in a field she loved that had hours flexible enough for her to ply her craft on the weekends. We had writers like Betsy who was a staple in Dallas-area TV and radio. And we knew our movies; we knew the shit out of them. I had customers who would come directly to me for all of their movie recommendations; I remember pointing a man to a little-known new movie by a couple of then-unknown brothers and winning his loyalty for life (Blood Simple). I remember impressing a girl so much with my foreign film knowledge by pointing her to the films of Jean-Jacques Beineix that we ended up watching Betty Blue together on the couch in her one-bedroom apartment and doing it on that same couch before Betty had even poked her eye out. And we even got the occasional celebrity: I met Chris Evert, NBC sportscaster Bill Macatee (dating Evert at the time, allegedly), and the writer Calvin Trillin (whom I surprised simply by knowing who he was).
Blockbuster had obviously grown too big for its own good; it couldn’t keep pace with modern technology and its passing was inevitable. But I for one will mourn that passing.
Another reader:
I clerked at Blockbuster off and on for four years. It was a part-time college job, and every time I’d leave and come back they’d have a new store manager and would want me to go through training again because they’d changed some insignificant procedural detail of the job like a new step in the nine-step checkout process. Yes, they wanted you to go through all nine steps of a carefully scripted upselling routine, and even though most of us didn’t follow it, every clerk had little printouts of the process taped to our computer monitors.
I tended to only observe steps 1, 8, and 9 because I’m a big fan of not slowing down the line, although we’d often add in the all-important “negotiation over and removal of late fees” steps. Those weren’t in the official process for some reason, but the district manager once told us “it’s not worth losing a customer over a late fee under $10.” I didn’t ask for any clarity beyond that, as it seemed like cart blanche permission to remove all my friends’ fines, and if they racked up larger ones I could just take them off in installments.
The point of sale system that I used in my last year there (2004) was DOS-based and probably hadn’t changed since the early-’90s. It had severe limitations on memory, meaning that transaction-level data would drop off after six months. The system would retain records of old late fees, but we wouldn’t have a way of referencing the original transactions. This meant that one easy way to avoid paying a fee was to just wait a few months and then ask a clerk what movie the fee was for.
Unlike most libraries, the systems were not networked, so I had no way of checking inventory at other stores without calling them. This often played out on busy Friday night shifts with a long line and a popular new release that everyone wanted and no one had in stock. And naturally we’d often get tied up with an insistent customer who wanted us to call every Blockbuster within a 30-minute drive.
Blockbuster settled a class-action lawsuit over late fees in 2001, and for several months we were printing out information about it onto everyone’s receipt. The receipts stretched beyond 3-feet (yes, we measured), and there was a phone number that people could call to get a couple of coupons for free rentals and $1 off candy. Another consequence was that clerks were no longer allowed to refer to these controversial charges as “late fees.” They were now “extended viewing fees,” but the policy didn’t change.
The perks of the job included the free rentals and the exposure to the eclectic mix of customers in the Delmar Loop neighborhood of St. Louis. The Loop is a stretch of bars and restaurants near a university, so you could count on a steady stream of the inebriated from mid-evening to midnight on most nights. I’m also a firm believer working at least one retail or restaurant gig during a holiday season builds character. We found ways to have fun with it all. For my part, I always made sure that Die Hard made its way to the special display of holiday movie rentals.
In hindsight, the only things working against Blockbuster were the ridiculous pricing model, widespread hatred from the customer base over late fee policies, auto-charging of credit cards for said fees, traditional competition from Hollywood Video and indy stores (which could carry porn), new competition from Netflix, Redbox, BitTorrent, YouTube, Amazon, premium cable channels, OnDemand, Dish, and Hulu, and massive cultural shifts in media consumption patterns caused by widespread adoption of the internet and the move away from removable media formats in general. But other than those things, Blockbuster’s business model was completely sound.