Next week, Blockbuster will be delisted from the NYSE. Fuck yes.
When I was about 5 years old, Blockbuster was purchased by Viacom and basically became a house hold thing. I remember taking so many trips with my family to Blockbuster on Friday nights to rent a movie and sit around the TV. What I didn’t understand until I was older was the fucked up, shady shit they were doing. They started out with decent prices for rentals to draw in customers. Before Blockbuster, the only way to rent movies was to go to Mom-and-Pop rental stores. As they expanded, they drove out all of the Mom-and-Pop shops “There Will Be Blood”-style. After that was done, they had everyone wrapped around their fingers and knew they’d pay whatever price to rent a movie so they jacked it up to $5. Then in the early 2000’s, a company called Netflix came out. Slowly, but surely, they started to run Blockbuster out of business. For the price of renting two movies, you could rent an unlimited amount for a month. I was always skeptical about having to wait for the DVDs to arrive until I bought an Xbox 360. Soon enough, Netflix allowed you to stream unlimited movies straight to the console. But you weren’t able to stream some movies. Then along came Redbox. Over the past two years, Redbox has been hitting the final nail into Blockbuster’s coffin. Karma; What goes around, comes around. Fuck yes. Who would’ve thought that not gouging your customers and offering a product for a decent price would actually work? Fuck Blockbuster. So stoked this day has come.
