Blockbusted

As Blockbuster gets ready to close its remaining 300 stores in the US, Alexis Madrigal pays homage:

This was our version of the great communal gatherings of the theater! This was our attenuated version of public space! We didn’t even browse the objects themselves, but avatars of the cassettes. Remember? All the tapes were stored behind the counter, and you’d carry this empty box that represented the movie up to the front register and they’d pull it out of their archival cabinet and load it into a clear plastic container for you. Josh Greenberg wrote a book about the creation of the home movie industry, From Betamax to Blockbuster, and he highlights how strange that was, “In the video store, customers browsed movies, represented by boxes that contained nothing more tangible than the experience of watching a movie itself.” For the industry, it was a way of helping you forget you weren’t watching on the silver screen, but the 22″ TV your parents bought at Walgreen’s.

Liz Galvao, who worked at Blockbuster in 2004 and 2005, remembers “one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.” But Jason Bailey, also a former employee, feels differently: “Let’s not soft-soap the fact that this was a chain that ran roughshod over local businesses, gouged customers on a regular basis, employed scores of movie-ignorant dullards, refused to stock controversial titles, imposed a bullshit ‘family’ morality that was hypocritical at best, and operated on a business model that was less about Film than it was about Product”:

Here’s a story that encapsulates everything you need to know about Blockbuster Video:

during a down moment in the initial, training shift for my part-time job at the Big Blue, I posed what seemed a fairly safe small-talk question to the store manager: So, what are your favorite movies? It was an icebreaker that had served me well in my three previous video store gigs; I’d been doing it since I was a teenager, mostly at rinky-dink mom-and-pop operations, but since the slick, well-funded Blockbuster franchise had driven them all out of town, I finally had to give in and go to work for the Evil Empire. But even my cynicism about my new employer didn’t prepare me for an answer I’d never heard from a fellow employee in all my years in the video store business. “Oh, I don’t really watch movies,” my manager cheerfully and matter-of-factly replied. “I mean, I’m around ‘em all day, so I don’t really wanna watch ‘em when I go home.” She wasn’t my manager for long; within a few months, Blockbuster had promoted her to district manager. And that was Blockbuster Video, in a nutshell.

But the Big Blue isn’t quite dead yet; Kathryn Olson presents a map that shows “the company is still going strong abroad, with 1,295 locations outside the U.S., including in Brazil, Mexico, the U.K., and Australia.”