Incredible, showing five stores in 1986, more than 5,700 stores in the US in 2005.
In December, 2019 just one store in Bend, Oregon.
Last year Marc Randolph, the co-founder of Netflix wrote in his book, “THAT WILL NEVER WORK: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of An Idea”, about a 2000 meeting they had with Blockbuster CEO John Antioco where they pitched the company on buying the DVD-by-mail startup for $50 million. Randolph says they proposed a merger that would see Netflix run Blockbuster's online operations, combining the two companies' strengths.
He writes “it was tiny, involuntary, and vanished almost immediately. But as soon as I saw it, I knew what was happening: John Antioco was struggling not to laugh.”
He says they left Dallas with no deal, writing “I had genuinely held out hope that (Blockbuster) it would save us. Now it was clear that if we were going to get out of the crash alive, it was entirely on us. We would have to be ruthless in our focus on the future. As my father used to tell me, sometimes the only way out is through.”
Blockbuster reached its peak in 2005, with 84,300 employees and 9,094 stores worldwide. The company's decline was swift and fateful. With revenue crashing in the face of competition from Netflix and rental kiosks like Redbox, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010.
Has there been industry that has seen a swifter decline than Blockbuster & video rental stores?