It has nothing to do w/ Netflix you nerds.

I worked for Blockbuster in the late 90s, it is an evil company who’s strategy was to drive other businesses into the ground and charge you exorbirant fees that really were unnecessary.

Blockbuster would:
- Buy up mom & pop chains (backed by their Viacom money, they had plenty to throw around) and covert them to BB or shut them down completely. The store I worked at used to be one of these local chains that BB converted… and people were PISSED. So to say people only hate BB now and not then is assumptous

- Buy or rent properties close to BB chains to prevent any competition from moving close by. That’s not conspiracy, I heard that crap right out of a district managers mouth after he spent a day of ’shopping’ for locations. Monthly employee newsletters were practically nothing but a list of “look who we bought now!”. I wish I kept those newsletters. It was so well known and wide-spread, it got to the point where some investors were starting up independent video stores in the hopes that BB would come and gobble them up and they could cash out.

- Every price increase had no justifiable reason other than they could. Really, we asked.

- The reason VHS tapes were $5 or more to rent is because of the old rental system: Movie studios would release a tape ‘for rental only’ first. These tapes were priced at $100 each for the rental chains, who of course made money back by renting the same tape over and over. Ok, that makes sense. But when DVDs came out, they didn’t follow that rental system. Movie studios wanted consumers to buy into DVD at that time, so instead of the ‘rental first, then retail sale later’-model, they would release DVDs for sale and rental at the same time. In other words, when a new movie was released, the VHS rental-only tape was $100 while the DVD copy was $25. Yet the cost of renting a DVD at BB was higher. As a matter of fact, the overhead of running a rental chain is much cheaper now because of DVD… yet the prices to rent @ BB never changed

- Another manager once visited another local mom & pop place so he could scope out their adult videos… because apparently local ordinances state you can only rent or sell so many adult movies depending on the size of the room they were on display in. So he went to go see how many they had and how small the room was… and then he filed a complaint to the county. Whether the store had 1 or 100 adult movies, it didn’t matter, BB has NONE, so what was the point of busting them? For no better reason than to harass them. Again, not my assumption… you should have seen how smug my manager was about what he did. He bragged to everyone about it. Nor did he come up with that idea on his own.

And yes, when I was through working at BB, I did my best to avoid renting from there.

It caught up to them when Netflix and Gamefly came out. Look at BB now… they haven’t done anything innovative in the last 10 years. Always reactionary, always copying. It’s all they know.

Think I’m being harsh… but if BB were such a great company with good karma, they wouldn’t been grasping at straws like they are now.

BB online lets you return the movies you got in the mail to a brick & mortar store, right? Convenience? No… it’s strategy to get you in the doors and hope you spend money.

All this Live Mesh stuff… it won’t happen. It will fail because BB is too greedy and dumb.

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Huh? So after M$ makes this big exclusive deal w/ Netflix + Xbox Live… they go to CockBlocker’s to develop for Live Mesh?

I am so confused. Actually, I’m just confused over any company or corporation willing to work with Blockbuster. Blockbuster needs to die… unceremoniously in the street with no burial.

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