[kerblang]

It's sort of bizarre that an entrenched, widely despised corporate behemoth thoroughly deserving its own demise has turned into an anachronistic mom-and-pop shop that just gets by. But isn't this the worst of both worlds? It's dystopian nostalgia. Maybe I just have too much of a grudge against the 1980's...

[Dig1t]

I grew up in the 90's and have nothing but warm fuzzy memories of renting a movie on Friday night and watching in the living room with my family, eating popcorn and candy.

I think there's probably a lot of people who have that from their childhood.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Parent is referencing how Blockbuster put all the local video stores out of business, like Walmart and Main Street America.

It happened with record stores, too, via Tower Records and other national chains I can’t remember now

[JackFr]

Good record stores outlasted Tower Records. What failed were record stores which were basically Tower records, only watered down weaker versions.

[pessimizer]

Good bookstores didn't outlast Borders/Barnes & Noble/Books-a-Million etc. (or at least 90% of them didn't.) It was really annoying when people were mourning the destruction of 15 year old book warehouses by Amazon, when I was still mourning 100 year old bookstores.

[MomoXenosaga]

I don't go to bookshops anymore. Books are just a commodity now, they push the latest product for a few weeks and move on the next. It is all part of the hype machine. After a month or so it's like the book never existed at all- it had it's five minutes of fame.

[js2]

On the other side of the counter, my wife (girlfriend at the time) worked at BB in HS. Even by minimum wage, teen job, retail standards it was awful. She loathed it. I'll bet if I even just say the word "blockbuster" to her three decades later she'll give me a stink eye.

[corrral]

That part was great. Getting charged late fees because you didn't have it back at 8:00AM sharp (or whatever) sucked.

[hinkley]

They also had quite a markup on those snacks. Not movie theater levels, but a lot higher than the convenience store.

[nend]

I don't really view that as evil though, just basic market dynamics.

Similarly, CVS sells cheerios for $7 a box. I don't think CVS is evil, sometimes I'm just lazy.

[chihuahua]

I totally agree with you, but there are people who refuse to see it that way. If there was an ice cream cart at the bottom of the Grand Canyon selling a scoop of ice cream for $10, some people would be outraged. Never mind that it's a remote location, it's very difficult to supply ice cream there, it's incredibly convenient to be able to buy ice cream there, etc.

For Blockbuster selling snacks, no one is under any pressure to buy snacks there. If you're really pressed for time or don't want to drive to another store for snacks, then maybe the ludicrously high price is worth it. If it's not worth it to you at that moment, then don't buy there.

It's only bad if there's a monopoly or some other form of coercion involved, which is clearly not the case for Blockbuster selling snacks. And yet, to some people, it proves that Blockbuster is the devil...

[hinkley]

Convenience stores also generally have a markup versus grocery stores. That they had a markup above that was always a bit questionable. My recollection is that over time they switched to some more niche candies, things you couldn't necessarily find down the street and so the apples-to-oranges problem gave them a bit of an excuse.

[altdataseller]

Same, Growing up in the US, I also have warm memories of TGIF, where we'd watch Family Matters together as a family on Friday night.

[solardev]

Wait, did TGIF go away too?! :(

Lol, I grew up overseas and TGIF was where we'd go to celebrate "American style" as a family, like on the 4th of July or whatever. First time I ever had potato skins. Didn't even know that was considered an edible food source until that day. Blew my mind as a kid.

[fetus8]

Poster above you is talking about a block of TV programming called TGIF as well.

The fast casual restaurant chain still exists, and is definitely still cartoonishly embellished with Americana, and surprisingly decent food for what it is.

[curlftpfs]

Still, not once has the United Nations passed a resolution to fund the building of TGI Fridays franchises in South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly everyone lacks access to warm, inviting restaurants with vibrant Americana-themed decor [1] https://www.theonion.com/tgi-fridays-is-a-human-right-182535...

[solardev]

Lol! They jest, but TGIF was literally my main reference for "America" before I visited for the first time. They do a better job propagandizing than VoA for sure.

[TGIF]

They had a TGI Fridays on the US military bases in Afghanistan.

[solardev]

Ahhh, thanks for the clarification. I'm glad the restaurant is still around.

[LeifCarrotson]

I did as well. While helping set up my parents (now Grandma and Grandpa) on our Disney+ and Netflix plans, we discussed the demise of Blockbuster.

As it turns out, they did a really good job of insulating us as kids from the backup plans for broken VHS tapes, late fees, mis-boxed movies, returns that were accepted but never registered, out-of-stock hit movies, and other 'adult' problems. Their memories of movie nights did not have quite the same golden hue, but they were happy that they'd fostered that kind of memory in spite of the stresses of parenting.

[_fat_santa]

The way I see it, there are really two Blockbusters. One is an evil corporate behemoth, the other is the neighborhood video store that lives on in our memories. These guys aren't keeping Blockbuster running so much as they are keeping the nostalgic memory of it going.

TBH I'm a bit surprised no one has tried to buy the Blockbuster brand from Dish and restart the company. I feel like you could effectively run one much like a comic book store, there's always a niche that will patronize the business.

[causi]

I don't purchase movies anymore but I could see myself going to a store to rent a 4K blu-ray to get the commentary tracks. Those are hard to come by online.

[registeredcorn]

That's one of the things that kills me about present day distribution. There is such a massive hole in not getting to hear from the creators the way you could with DVDs. Shows like The Simpsons, etc. have offered a massive amount of information presented through commentary, that wouldn't otherwise be known.

[causi]

When I was a kid I'd watch Futurama on DVD with commentary and think "Wow I bet one day I'll be able to pause any movie and click on anything and get all the info about it." I can't believe we went the opposite direction.

[TylerE]

This is one thing Amazon does well. Pause almost anything and it will show you the actors presently on screen (with headshots, which you can click on to get more info.

They'll also name the song playing, if any.

[causi]

Eh, that's not really anything you couldn't do with google almost as easily. I mean real multimedia. I want to pause Lord of the Rings, click on a sword, and get the passage where the sword is described in the book. I want to click on a character and get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the costume. I want it all.

[gpspake]

I guess the other side of that coin is I feel like we have more access to creators than ever with youtube and podcasts. If I want to "meet my heroes" so to speak, I don't need DVD extras, I can just watch them in all sorts of formats online. Pre internet, you couldn't really watch Scorcese on hot ones.

[pmarreck]

Picture this- you walk into a Blockbuster and only the cardboard covers are on the shelves. You touch one and a ML-driven camera begins a preview of the movie on a nearby screen. You can chat with anyone else there of course. When you find something you like, you take the cardboard cover (recyclable of course) out of the store and another ML-driven camera records the transaction and automatically bills you for the rental, then sets up a stream of it at your home on their app running on your device (appletv or whatever). (If you don't actually want the cardboard cover you can deposit it into a box outside the store, but the nominal cost of them is low enough that the store wouldn't care if you actually brought it home.)

Best of both worlds?

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I think that Dish doesn't want to sell the rights, at least not for a small sum. In the documentary "The Last Blockbuster", they discuss how the rights to continue to use the name for the store are renegotiated every X amount of years (I think it's 3?) and that if the deal doesn't go through that it's essentially the end of the store.

[fundad]

Funny because there were the same 2 sides to the cable companies. Your closest shop and your TV’s internet was out connection to the culture.

I’m ok renting or buying digital movies from a big corp like Apple or Disney now that I don’t have to drive to a store.

Though the pipe to my house doesn’t need a big corp because we should have a free national municipal fiber network.

[bombcar]

Double so since something like Redbox could have definitely used the brand.

[mxuribe]

They could have bought the Blockbuster brand, and combined it into a gawdy 80s style amalgamam of purple (you know, blue plus red)...and called it something like BoxBuster! And beyond dvd rentals, sell Roku devices. But, alas! ;-)

[karaterobot]

Yeah, ironic because Blockbuster is what killed off the mom and pop stores it now stands in for in our collective memory of the 90s.

I actually liked our local Blockbuster, and have fond memories of it, but only because it was run by the same employees from the independent video store it drove out of business. I liked that one even better.

[artificial]

This reminds me of smaller bookstores prior to the era of Borders and Barnes and Noble dominance. pours one out

[legitster]

Smaller bookstores are actually doing pretty okay these days: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/02/18/indie-bookstores-com...

Mostly because Amazon decimated corporate chains, which freed up more market for independent stores.

[ghaff]

Though independents are still a pretty niche business. Around where I am there are certainly far fewer of them than there were before the big chains became dominant.

[legitster]

I don't know. I'm in a pretty redneck county and even here there are dozen independent bookstores.

Most of them are tied to a coffeeshop though. But if you check your local map you might be surprised.

[pessimizer]

Even the article said there were 10-15 bookstores in a place that had 35 of them in the 70s.

[bluedino]

How are they still in business, by the way? It seemed like they were just a Starbucks location with a ton of overhead, I thought we'd seen the last of them when pandemic shut everything down.

I loved B&N by the way, more computer-related books than WaldenBooks, but not as many as Borders.

[munificent]

> How are they still in business, by the way?

They've broadened out into being general "gift stores". My local Barnes and Noble has a large toys section (mostly LEGO and educational stuff), board games, puzzles, music (lots of vinyl), stationery (fancy journals).

It's essentially "stuff introverts like" in a nice space.

[jabroni_salad]

Around the time of the pandemic they implemented a strategic change to have local management arrange the store rather than auctioning shelf placement to publishers like most other retailers do. This has actually made B&N pretty nice to browse compared to a few years ago.

[bombcar]

Because "Starbucks with overhead" is a surprisingly effective business model apparently; though if you go into one you'll notice that there are a lot more chotchkeys for sale near the front of the store (even LEGO lol).

[legitster]

> Blockbuster is what killed off the mom and pop stores

Is there a source for this? Usually, both rise and fall together with consumer demand. When I grew up, Blockbuster was one of a dozen options in town.

As an example, there are more independent coffee shops today than before Starbucks expanded.

[bombcar]

Starbucks grew the "expensive coffee" market, and so independents had a niche to slip into (expensive, but not Starbucks) - Blockbuster did nothing to grow the "rental movie" market, and a given market in an area is roughly limited to the number of houses in said market.

People drink less office/gas station coffee than they used to, and so can drink more Starbucks/independent coffee. The same didn't happen to the mom and pop video rental places (though the ones that survived blockbuster, usually by being in a market too small to support a Blockbuster, often outlived them (the one near me closed a few years ago finally)).

[omar_alt]

I distinctively remember around 1994 two family run stores in the UK town I grew up in disappearing and the reason was the same, Blockbuster.

I didn’t play games much but I recall them also renting out Japanese nintendo games and also sold the necessary cartridge converters to play Starfox.

[ars]

> the reason was the same, Blockbuster.

The "name" of the reason might be Blockbuster, but the actual reason was that Blockbuster had a larger selection. Those mom and pop stores were really small, so if you wanted something else you had to go to Blockbuster anyway, so why bother dealing with more than one store even for the stuff they had? Just get everything at Blockbuster.

It's the same with retail stores - I don't go to the small stores, even if they might have what I want - why should I? I can go to the larger store and get everything and not have to think about it.

[acheron]

Yeah that's how I remember it too. In one town we lived in, we always got videos from the independent place. My main memory of Blockbuster is that one time my parents went there instead, and they gave us the wrong movie, which my sister and I were very disappointed by.

In another town we lived in, the video rental place was a local chain with fewer than 10 locations, maybe just around 5. I don't remember if a Blockbuster even existed locally.

[LegitShady]

the wikipedia article for blockbuster contains a quote/source about this (search it for "mom and pop") but the citation no longer exists due to link rot.

essentially blockbuster operated at larger scales than many small video businesses and so had smaller unit costs while also having more selection.

[causi]

I loved when Blockbuster came to town because it cut the price of rentals by two thirds. I was not a wealthy child and being able to rent a game every few weeks was way better than every couple of months.

[fundad]

How is that ironic? Memories of the 90’s woupd be all about the demise of mom and pop shops and generally flattening the character of US cities and towns (see also Starbucks).

It’s more discomforting than ironic.

[WalterBright]

The local video rental proprietor told me when she was closing up for good was that Netflix destroyed her business.

[mikeocool]

Anecdotally, I recall a brief moment in the late 2000's where the mom and pop shops had a bit of resurgence (or at least a stay on their execution) -- when Netflix DVD's by mail had put most Block Busters out of business, but before every movie was readily available on streaming services.

If it was Friday night, and you'd just sent back your netflix disc -- or you were looking to watch something that wasn't at the top of your queue, the mom and pop video rental place was your only option. At least in NYC, it seemed like this kept those places going a little but longer than anyone would have guessed when Block Buster was still around.

Though once streaming became prevalent they all disappeared pretty quickly.

[rhino369]

NYC probably had more indie rental stores around just because of the population density. In my suburb, Blockbuster had already wiped them out in the 90's.

[Apocryphon]

Feels like even without streaming or even Netflix’s original DVD-by-mail delivery service, Redbox could’ve eaten brick and mortar movie rental stores.

[exmadscientist]

According to a coworker, Redbox/Outerwall had massive management issues, which probably explains why they had so much trouble. He insisted that the corporate culture got significantly better when private equity bought them out, which is a statement I don't recall ever having heard before.

[TedDoesntTalk]

I don't recall Redbox existing, at least in my area, during that time.

[WalterBright]

This was before Netflix streaming, when Netflix was just dvds.

[overthemoon]

It is weird. I think it's a stand-in for nostalgia for lost media formats and the experience they engendered. I have a lot of fuzzy feelings about it, because it was an event on Friday when my parents would take us there, or my dad would stop by after work and get movies or video games. I would just about shit myself when he finally got a copy of Super Mario All-Stars or Earthbound. When I was a little older it was close enough that I could ride my bike there.

But for me, it's not really about Blockbuster. It's about the format of home video. All the ritual, the excitement surrounding a new release that everyone wanted, sitting down to watch it together. It's about the object of video, the thing you can hold, and is similar to why I like to collect vinyl. I like the artifact in and of itself, along with what's encoded on it.

[mikkergp]

Since I'm obsessed with the recent 80's resurgence(acknowledging that this reflection of the 1980's is much more polished than the original) I'm curious, what's your grudge against the 1980's?

[rco8786]

> widely despised

Wait? It was? I grew up through the 90s and have nothing but fond memories of Blockbuster

[rubyn00bie]

Yeah I personally hated blockbuster because they sent me to collections over like $9 in late fees I didn’t know I had. People have fond memories but I have nearly none of video rentals. Long lines, poor selection, and over priced… along with bullshit “late fees,” I can say I am happy they failed. Truly video rental stores were not great, and I dunno why people remember them like they were.

[thewebcount]

Yeah, likewise. What I'm noticing in the comments is people who say, "My parents would take me there on Fridays..." seem to be nostalgic for it, but for those of us who were adults, we ran into the things you talk about.

I distinctly remember 2 specific problems: 1) Being unable to get the latest release you wanted to watch. This was a big problem when video stores (not just Blockbuster) would only get in a few copies of new movies. Eventually Blockbuster got some sort of deal with the studios where they would get in something like 100 copies of the latest releases and the problem became #2:

2) Being unable to find anything but the most popular movies. If you wanted to watch that slightly less popular artsy film (but not anything as obscure as a foreign film, just not a (lowercase "b") blockbuster movie), they'd only have a few copies of it, and they'd inevitably all be rented out whenever you wanted to watch it.

I just remember going around the entire store and saying, "seen it, seen it, seen it, don't want to see it, seen it," etc.

[pessimizer]

Also they didn't stock gory horror, 99.9% of foreign films, classics, or porn. If Blockbusters shut down your local video store, you just weren't going to be able to watch a wide variety of movies anymore (until Netflix's DVDs by mail came along.)

[ghaff]

Mostly rose-colored glasses nostalgia probably. Being able to rent a movie whenever[0] you wanted to and watch it at home was extremely transformative in a way that someone who grew up with streaming (not you I realize) would find difficult to appreciate. A lot of movies weren't even purchasable as a practical matter (priced to rent) at the time.

[0] Well, if they had it and it was in stock.

[bombcar]

They'd even rent VCRs and DVD players, which was a big deal early on when they were multiple hundreds of dollars.

[amyjess]

They'd rent video game consoles too.

Speaking of which, I miss video game rentals. I spent so much time as akid at Blockbuster looking for games to rent. Even now, I'd like to be able to play with a game for a few days before committing to paying for the whole game.

(and of course, I say this with a hundred unplayed games in my Steam library...)

[bombcar]

https://www.gamefly.com exists but I feel it's days are numbered, what with console makers doing everything they can to tie games to accounts tied to a given console ...

[TedDoesntTalk]

Before video rental stores, we rented a film projector at the public library and movies on reel-to-reel film. Small selection of old stuff like Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, etc.

[throwaway675309]

A lot of the people who have fond recollections of video rental stores are because they were kids at the time, going to the video store was associated with Friday nights and family movie time for a lot of kids.

I'm sure their parents who were responsible for rewinding the tapes, late fees, etc. remember the video stores less fondly.

[pmarreck]

The 80's will always love you