Blockbuster? What’s that? The question everyone born after the year 2000 is asking themselves. Well for us older folks we know, or at least knew. The troubled franchise is almost, completely gone…Except for one last standing location in Oregon.
A couple franchise outlets in Alaska famously continued to survive long after the parent company of the formerly ubiquitous national chain folded. They were long bolstered by nostalgia as well as remote communities with a lack of high-speed Internet access for streaming video.
But now they’re both shutting their doors for the last time Sunday night, the AP reported.
What do the owners think?
The managers of the last remaining store posted their thoughts this week.
The stores were given some media attention a couple months ago by HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver which sent a jockstrap worn by Russell Crowe in the 2005 movie Cinderella Man to one of the stores. The item was reportedly displayed in an effort to boost business.
The video rental chain in 2000 notoriously made one of the worst business decisions of all time when it rejected a young company called Netflix whose CEO Reed Hastings offered to partner with the chain and run its online operations — Hastings was “laughed out of the room” as one report put it. Blockbuster then peaked in 2004 with an incredible 9,094 stores worldwide … and then quickly plummeted to declare bankruptcy in 2010.
It’s not clear how many (if any) Blockbuster stores have survived outside the U.S.
But now there’s only one Blockbuster store left in America: An outlet in Bend, Oregon.
