Mourning the demise of a daily experience
Columnist Mitch Albom laments the loss of the Blockbuster chain (there's just one store left) and the video rental ritual.
They were blue and yellow, and you could see their signs from far away. At their peak, they averaged nearly 100 per state, and it felt as if there was one on every corner. We joined their ranks. We had their membership cards. We knew their hours.
They were called Blockbuster, and if you are under 20 and reading this, you may not know what I’m talking about. Blockbuster is the American buffalo of the home entertainment world, once mighty, now all but gone.
I thought about this when I read that Blockbuster soon will close two of its remaining three stores, leaving it with one — one? — in all of the United States. From 4,500 stores in this country, from nearly 85,000 employees around the world, to one American outlet. One?
Bend, Oregon. That’s where you’ll have to go to wander the aisles and do what so many of us did in the 1980s and ’90s — “pick up a movie.”
It’s hard to fathom. Sure, many retail business have gone belly up or vanished in mergers. There are no more Marshall Field’s stores, or Filene’s, or W.T. Grants, or Hudson’s. But these were largely regional shopping experiences.
Blockbuster was everywhere. That was the idea. You could be on vacation, on a business trip, visiting your cousins in Duluth, but you found the local Blockbuster and you whipped out your blue and yellow membership card and you drove home with a clunky cassette tape of “Die Hard” or “Back to the Future” or “Terminator” that you popped in your — ahem — VHS player.
And, oh, yeah. After two days, you had to bring it back. Or get fined.
The extinction of a daily experience
Remember that? It was an everyday American conversation: “Where are you going?” “To grab some dinner.” “Stop by Blockbuster and get us a good movie.” “Where are you going?” “To grab some dinner.” “Stop by Blockbuster and take the movies back.”
Pick up. Drop off. It was, for many, a daily experience. Blockbuster made it easy for you, with mailbox-like units that you could deposit your used movies in like letters. You didn’t even have to get out of your car. You pulled up, rolled down your window...
And in writing this, I realize how absolutely ancient that must seem to a teenager.
Yes, kids, just as we used to hunt animals to bring food to the tribe, so, too, did we journey into the snowy night so our families could enjoy another viewing of “Home Alone.”
Now, perhaps you think I’m going to wax nostalgic about the good old days of videos with covers, or endless aisles of “Horror,” “Family,” “Foreign,” or the joy of checking out the “New This Week” display, or the oft-repeated conversations from Anchorage to Miami that began with holding up a particular tape and asking a Blockbuster salesperson, “Is this any good?”
But no. That’s not my point. Shopping methods have changed so much, so fast, that you barely have time to wave goodbye before a drone from Amazon drops a package on your head.