1. The wrong movie is in the box. These first few entries listed could be said about video stores in general. But once Blockbuster Video conquered the known video rental world, Blockbuster Video was “the video store.” The company became synonymous with what a video store is, and its downfall is largely because it kept being just a video store. So these are fair game. So: You get home from Blockbuster. You have your overpriced 2-liter soda and movie-theater-sized box of Skittles and your movie. You go to the DVD player and open the box. And then:“WHERE IS STARSHIP TROOPERS? THIS IS FLATLINERS!”
First of all, stop using "so" to begin your sentences, that's my thing! I can understand his first point here. There were many times we had to issue credits because a lazy employee would not open the case to verify the correct movie was in it. If this happened to you once, I apologize on behalf of all video store employees around the world, it was our mistake. If it happened to you more than once, you're a moron! Would it not be on you, as the customer, to check to see if you are receiving the right title? When Blockbuster was a busy place, we would have to go through hundreds, sometimes thousands, of movie cases in as short a period of time as possible when returning them from the drop-box so that you guys could have them on the floor to rent again...occasionally one or two mistakes would happen. And, we actually adopted a policy to not check the title in the box in order to get you out the door faster, because we all know that's what you guys wanted anyway...spend an hour looking for the award winning "Starship Troopers" and no more than four seconds to pay and get out! Oh, by the way, it was a stupid customer that put the wrong disc in the wrong case to begin with!
2. The scavenger hunt. The clerk’s computer says there’s one copy of Office Space in the store. But its not where it should be on the shelf. Maybe it’s behind another movie? Maybe its stacked in the wrong category? It couldn’t be under “Drama” could it? “Where is it? You said you had a copy in stock. Where is it!?” So you go on a scavenger hunt around the store with the clerk trying to find that missing copy of Office Space because you’re really in the mood for Office Space and your heart was set on watching it. The best part of this is when the poor schlub clerk gets on his hands and knees and goes through the return bin to see if it’s buried under copies ofTitanic. Then he finally says maybe Office Space was stolen. STOLEN. You know, like your time.
Love this one...it's as though the staff had the time to put the wrong movie behind the wrong cover box just to watch and laugh at the customer trying to find it. Again, this happened because of the customer. They would hold three or four selections, find something else they wanted and put one of those original selections behind the cover of the last movie they picked out. You think your time was wasted trying to find these titles??? Ha!! Nothing I liked more than trying to locate "The Land Before Time Part 72" for someone in the kids section on a Saturday night when they could have rented just about any other kids' movie to keep their little rugrat quiet for two hours.
3. The unkind. Now we’re going way back: Blockbuster was normally pretty decent about staying on top of this, but we can’t do a post on video store gripes without mentioning those VCR tapes that were not rewound. “Be Kind, Rewind.” Also: Scratched /unplayable rentals.
Again, customer interference. I could never, ever understand why someone would rent a video, watch it and not press the rewind button on their VCR. Never, never, never. But, returning four hundred movies at a time through our drop-box, we would easily find 25% of them not rewound...because that extra 60 seconds of having to wait for the VCR to rewind it was far too much to handle for the customer. We had those little box rewinders going all day in our stores. And scratched DVDs? You should have seen some of the DVDs we would get back. They looked like someone took a steak knife to them just to see how much damage they could do. We had people tell us they ran over the disc in their car......WHAT!?!? What the hell are you people doing? And why would you ever let your 2 year-old child handle our merchandise? Drove us crazy! Oh, and try to explain to a customer that there may be a problem with their VCR/DVD player. Holy shit! That was like saying "The DVD plays fine, and by the way, I raped your mother!".
4. The New Releases mirage. Blockbuster-specific gripes now: You think you’re not too late to get a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring even though its Friday night and it just came out this week, because there’s a whole section of the New Releases wall filled with copies of the film. But remember: The movie artwork boxes are hollow. The boxes with the actual discs are in the Blockbuster boxes behind the artwork boxes. None of the false-front boxes have movies behind them. It’s a trick! The display wall is a total mirage. Blockbuster succeeded in looking fully stocked with the latest movies, even when there’s not one copy in the store. Fooled you! Now go see if a copy of Legend is in, loser!
The writer of this article started off by saying Blockbuster was the "company that squashed countless local mom-and-pop video stores". You mean those stores that would have three copies of the newest releases for you to rent on the first Friday night of release? Blockbuster would have dozens, sometimes hundreds of copies of the biggest new release...that released every Tuesday. Why, oh, why would customers wait until the first Friday night to try and rent these titles? Oh, you may miss your episode of "The Biggest Loser" on TV that night, so you have to wait to watch the latest huge video release on the weekend. You and about five thousand other people we would see on a Friday night!! "What do you mean you're out of copies of The Fellowship Of The Ring at 9pm on a Friday night?!". Seriously?!? We had 164 copies that were rented out by 5pm...deal with it and rent something else, jackass! And the false boxes were there to show you how many copies we had, not had in, big difference that most of the world understood.
5. Late fees. Of course. Late fees. Once you rented a Blockbuster video, the clock was ticking. You better watch it the first night, especially if it was a coveted New Release. Those dollar-a-day fees stack up quick. And there’s an unholy checking-account-crippling $60-80 full replacement fee lurking if you ever actually lost one of those boxes. For all their brightly lit stores, Blockbuster Video operated like the grim gang in Goodfellas: “Oh you forgot to return a DVD by midnight? F–k you, pay me! You returned it with the wrong disc? F–k you, pay me!”
Yes, you'd better watch it in a day, or else we wouldn't have any of The Fellowship Of The Ring to rent to you on that Friday night...see how this all works, James? Please, take our movie for a night and return it to us four weeks from now without any penalty. Oh, you want to reimburse us for the lost revenue from you having our product sit on your fireplace mantle for all that time? No, please, it was our pleasure. (Is my sarcasm coming through?). I like your use of the Goodfellas quote, because that's exactly how we felt! Does it really take eighteen days to watch Billy Madison, James...does it?? F--k you, pay me!
6. Prudishness. You had to get your porn elsewhere. Okay. But even NC-17 films of some artistic/entertainment merit were banned by the chain in the 1990s, which was yet another blow against studios looking for a way to distribute NC-17 films. In other words: If you really wanted to appreciate Elizabeth Berkley causing a minor tsunami in a swimming pool in Showgirls, you couldn’t get it at Blockbuster.
I must say, I agree with you on this one. Blockbuster in the States would be hugely against any film that contained questionable values. Up here in Canada, we didn't have too much of a problem with that. We may have less copies of said movies, and they'd be positioned high on the New Release wall, away from the precious eyes of your six year-old, but we'd have 'em. Another reason why Canada is so much better than the U.S.. (Crap, I may have opened up a can of worms with that).
7. Indie/foreign film? Ha! It’s called Blockbuster Video for a reason, film geek. You want an art film, or something with subtitles, you best go someplace else. But Blockbuster will have 71 copies of Enemy of the State.
Well, you said it yourself, it's called Blockbuster Video for a reason. Although, again, up here in Canada, Blockbuster enrolled in many programs that would see our stores stocked with a number of great Festival winners and Foreign classics, of which 98% of the customers would ignore for Enemy Of The State.
8. Those uniforms. During its heyday, Blockbuster had Disney-style clean-cut rules for its employees, who also had to wear pretty dorky uniforms (rather than dress like, you know, normal people, like at indie video and record stores). A group of employees actually sued Blockbuster for a 1994 policy that banned male employees from having long hair...
You're right, we should have dressed up in our ripped jeans, our Megadeth t-shirts, our spiked hair and face jewelery sticking out of our cheeks and eyebrows. No customer would have had a problem with that back in the '90's. Our uniforms did become more lax as the years went on, but there's nothing wrong with looking like you work somewhere when you work somewhere! Did you also want us to tell you what a dufus you were for thinking Little Nicky was the greatest movie ever? I mean to your face, of course.
9. Stagnation. When it comes to resisting change, Blockbuster critics point to the company being too slow to react to the rise of DVD-by-mail services and online streaming (Netflix was operating for six years before Blockbuster got in the movie-by-mail service game — which is astounding). But the company was slow to embrace other changes too that made even its core business pretty lousy. From shifting from VCR tapes to DVD. From pan-and-scan format videos to widescreen/letterbox. From DVD to Blu-ray. Being a Blockbuster customer who actually loved movies, and therefore loved improvements in the way movies were formatted or displayed, meant always being frustrated or disappointed because the company seemed reluctant to stock titles and formats until most of their customers were demanding the new versions. You never really got the feeling Blockbuster, as a company,loved, or even understood, movies. It’s like the way rental discs were given to customers in generic Blockbuster boxes stripped of their original packaging — you felt like you were renting a product unit, not a piece of commercial art.
Once again, purely an American thing here. I was there when DVD took over VHS. We were right on top of it, and it only made sense at the time. DVDs were much cheaper, took up less space on the racks, were more durable (unless you used them as coasters for your glasses that inexplicably had nails protruding from them) and they had room for more data for things like special features and audio tracks. Blu-ray was a slower process because it was a slower conversion from DVD to Blu-ray. But Blockbuster didn't care about the person who needed the newest of the new technology the first day it was released. We cared about the masses...and the business was hugely successful because of it. We didn't dictate to our customers what format they should have. We listened when the vast majority of our customers said they weren't going to get a Blu-ray player right away because they didn't want to spend, at the time, thousands of dollars for a new player and a HDTV. And why would we let you have the original packaging to our movies? So you could destroy them as well, making it near impossible to sell the movie off at a later date?
10. Then everything fell apart. First standards were allowed to slip a little. Remember how Blockbuster went from having every video displayed with the box cover facing toward you? And then all of a sudden stores starting stacking DVDs like library books to pile more in? And there was also the surge of video games, which was understandable. But then, during the final recent years of Blockbuster, the stores began to stock all sort of random items, whether they had something to do with movies or games or not. Posters, stuffed animals, T-shirts, toys. The stores went from creepily anti-septic and strictly regimented environments to random flea markets peddling anything to survive.
"...peddling anything to survive"...exactly. We had to. Why? Because you, the customer, were beginning to illegally download everything you could. We had to pile up our titles because it was never enough for you...we only had so much square footage in the store. We tried and tried to meet your ever increasing demands but it was just never enough. And now look where we are.
I loved being part of the movie rental business for nearly twenty years (eight at Blockbuster, but stints at Jumbo, Ambassador and Rogers as well). I loved to talk movies with people and watch thousands of movies for free. There were some horrible customers, as in any retail environment, that could ruin your day, but they were a very small minority. Most of the people that came through our stores were happy, friendly and accepting to any recommendations we had. Here are my ten reasons why I will miss Blockbuster:
1) Free movies
2 - 9) The people!
10) Making fun of people like you after they leave the store!
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