Blockbuster

Former Blockbuster store, Sherman Oaks, California

This is ironic in a number of ways and on a number of levels.

To start, for those who don’t recognize this, it’s a reference to Clerks, Kevin Smith’s self-funded first movie. Budgeting being what it was, he shot the film at the convenience store where he worked. This required filming at night, after the store was closed, which further required an excuse within the film for why the store’s protective shutters were closed. To wit: Dante, the protagonist of the film, arrives at work to find someone has jammed gum in the shutter locks so that they cannot be opened. He uses shoe polish to paint a message on a sheet that he hangs on the shutters: “I assure you we’re OPEN!”

Here, meanwhile, the message says 1) we are a bunch of film geeks 2) we recognize our place in the world at this instant -- or, at least, what it was until the day we had to put this sign up and 3) we found the most appropriate movie quote available to recognize that this is the end of an era. Even if it’s not an era that anyone will look back on with nostalgia.

Of course, Dante isn’t the only “clerk” in the film. His friend Randal works next door at, yep, a video store, a “shitty” mom-and-pop video rental store, exactly the sort of place that Blockbuster was able to out-compete on cost and price and selection and eventually drive out of business. They had obvious cost advantages in scale, were able to market nationally on brand, and also leveraged local demographic data to ensure that they had a better selection of movies that the locals wanted to see. Even if there were concerns that driving others out of business was going to lower the overall availability of movies.

(Ironically enough, though, I rented Clerks from just such a mom-and-pop store.) 

The former store pictured here is one of the last of the Blockbuster company-owned stores to be closed. It was out-competed by Redbox (cheaper rentals from lower-cost kiosks) and Netflix (video rentals by mail - which cut into profits even before online streaming was available). It was almost certainly the last store from which I rented an actual physical movie product, probably in July 2001, based on the movies I recall renting. Which is probably just confirmation that I wasn’t their primary consumer.

The Crisis isn’t the only time businesses shut down, and there’s nothing in particular that makes Blockbuster’s demise more-or-less likely now. Netflix wouldn’t have been possible with the videotapes that Blockbuster started with - too heavy for rental-by-mail to support. Tapes are more expensive to duplicate than DVDs, which means the latter became cheap enough to buy rather than rent. It’s not surprising that Blockbuster was losing profits soon after online streaming availability started to spread, which similarly required advances in technology that perhaps depended on little more than the steady growth from Moore’s Law. Once that point arrived, renting physical movies in physical locations became an untenable business model.

In any case, companies simply don’t last forever, and 25 years is a solid run. Hmm - in fact it may be around the median - is it possible that Turnings bring enough change to push marginal companies over the edge? If so, we’d expect new businesses to start (and to end, regardless of age) more frequently around that time. Which is falsifiable, at least.