There are many people who have been calling the slow, painful demise of Blockbuster Video a good thing. I whole heartedly disagree. While I won't argue that a company that has been run as poorly as Blockbuster serves to go out of business, its fall only benefits its competition.
Full disclosure: I am close to some who works at Blockbuster. However, we also subscribe to Netflix and Hulu streaming services.
When Netflix was still starting out, it engaged in a price war with Blockbuster in the disc through mail program. This war ultimately led to lower prices on both services. Without one of the major players, Netflix, Redbox and others will not have the same incentive to keep their prices low.
I work with many people who live in rural areas. Many of them only have internet access through slow, expensive satellite providers. This makes it cost prohibitive and for some, technically impossible to use the on demand rental options of Netflix, Amazon and iTunes. They have Redbox kisoks but that limits the titles to only the newest releases and a handful of catalog titles. Blockbuster stores carry thousands of older movies and TV box sets that would otherwise be unavailable to them.
Despite what tech blogs want you to believe, they are still some people who like to have a physical copy of their movie. There are still some debates over who owns the rights to a movie that you purchased when you don't have a physical copy. Netflix does not want to mail you movies. The postage is eating away at their profits. They would much rather deliver movies through your high speed internet connection. Redbox it working on their own streaming solution. Physical media is dying. Blockbuster is one of the few companies that is still interested in physical media. For those of you who enjoy picking up gently used copies of movies at good prices, good luck. They are going to be scarce.
This one should be pretty self explanatory. Unemployment in this country is already high. These employees are victims of working for poor upper management. Enough said.
Like most movies, most games aren't any good (especially Wii games). Blockbuster charges roughly $10 to rent a game. That's a much more appealing price tag than $60. There aren't many other companies that offer game rentals. I don't know a single person who has used Gamefly and been satisfied with their service.
Blockbuster is/was a terribly run company that failed to give it's customers the value they wanted. However, it's demise will undoubtably be bad for the consumer. Anyone who believes otherwise is fooling themselves.
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