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It’s easy to consider household names like Walmart, Amazon, and Netflix and say, “Those companies are going to be around, like, forever.”
Allow me to introduce you to Blockbuster Video.
In its home video-fueled 2004 heyday, Blockbuster ran more than 9,000 stores (Walmart, by comparison, now has about 5,000). Some 83,000 people worked for the company stacking shelves with thousands of tapes and DVDs, checking out rentals, and best of all helping customers curate their home movie watching experience.
Today, there is one count it, one Blockbuster video store left, sitting at a lonely end of a strip mall in Bend, Oregon. The last Blockbuster does business the same way Blockbuster always did, its walls still painted in that garish, Cub Scout-like blue/yellow color scheme that at first lured you in and eventually chased you back out to the street.