Farewell, Blue & Gold - RTOTD #863

Day 863

Turns out my Blockbuster story from last week had great timing. The company announced yesterday that they were closing their remaining 300-ish stores around the country.

Man, this is just the next step as media stores all die.

First it was the record stores in the 90's and early 00's. Places that were dedicated record shops? They didn't last. The places that managed to transition from the record to the cassette to the cd didn't realize that the end-result of that evolution of music delivery was going to be the one that didn't include them. Digital. Big box stores like Best Buy that used media as loss-leaders to sell you a tv or a stereo were the first step. Napster and shit really put a beating on the record store even when 56k and DSL were the high-end of data delivery. The iPod and iTunes put another nail into them. Amazon and other non-traditional options for physical media really hurt them. And once we were all putting thousands of songs on our phones instead of needing to carry a 2nd device for music? That's when it was just a matter of shoveling the dirt back into the grave. It was dead.

And in a lot of ways? That's really quite sad. Obscure music becomes harder to find when you aren't thumbing through a row of import albums or checking out labels and release charts. Or in my case, checking the stuff out as I stocked the shelves in highschool. That kinda always made it easier. And as a consumer now? Finding "that guy" at the record store that knew every new album out and would recommend you this new thing that nobody else has heard about (like I spent most of late 99 and early 2000 doing with MUSE) and it would be killer? That guy doesn't exist anymore. You can't get that from iTunes. They don't have a "the record store guy" app or whatever to recommend shit. They just have their typical label shills that pay for ad space.

It was only a matter of time before it happened to movies. No, streaming hasn't yet reached the quality or market availability yet to truly be a viable alternative. There's far too many portions of the country that are missing the infrastructure and data speed yet to really replace dvds and blurays with streaming entirely. And while Redbox is great, it just doesn't replace a Blockbuster or whatever for old movies. A Redbox has no selection at all if the movie isn't under 2 months old. And adding games to them now just gives it less space for movies.

Good luck if you wanna watch Star Wars tonight and don't own it. Redbox doesn't have it. Netflix will give it to you in 3 days, but that's not tonight. None of the streaming services have it (amazon, Netflix, etc) and the only way you can buy it online is in the "all of the movies" bundle on iTunes and the like. At least before, if you wanted to watch Star Wars or Indiana Jones, you could head out the trusty Blockbuster and rent it.

So I guess those of you that want to rent it can pirate it and delete it. And those of you that live in the sticks and it'll take 4 days to download it from a torrent site? I guess you can make a trip to Walmart and buy it. But that kinda defeats the purpose of "renting it for $3 for 3 nights" thing. But that's about it for your choices.

So RIP Blockbuster. Your lack of a porn section and constant need to impulse sell candy and DirecTV will not be missed, but your ability allow us to watch some random 80's comedy or bad Wesley Snipes 90's action movie at our leisure will certainly be. Farewell, original blue & gold signage that BestBuy kinda stole. You will maybe sorta be missed. But you could always just make your not-Redbox machines at Sheetz like 3x the size and give us all of that selection again. We won't complain.

Yet another step down the road to a virtual-media only future where nothing is manufactured and all media is consumed and stored digitally. But if you people fuck with bookstores & comic book stores and make them disappear too, I'm going to start hunting people down. Books and comics are still infinitely better when consumed in physical format. I can sacrifice a tiny bit of audio or video quality to never have to wipe down another CD or DVD or get up to change discs. But if you think I'm going to live with not being able to file my comics in long boxes ore look at my bookshelf and hold and smell and see a real book with real pages and ink on them, well you've got another thing coming, fuckers!