Having graduated in the midst of the worst economic recession since World War 2 with a humanities degree I was lucky to get the type of minimum wage job I had gone back into education to escape. Customer Sales Representative at Blockbuster. Still it wasn’t all bad at least it was vaguely to do with my Film degree and I had spent so much time in video shops that I had romanticised them enough to make the bleakness of my situation seem bearable.
I had been surprised the business was still open in the first place when seeing the job advertised so I expected things to be quite dire, on my first few shifts however I was surprised to see how busy the shop was. There were still plenty of people it seemed who either did not have the means or the inclination to stream online or use Lovefilm’s postal services. The key for these, our remaining core customers, were new releases. You could not guarantee how quickly you would be sent a new release through the post and Lovefilm/Netflix did not get new releases until months and months after the DVD release.
These customers were voracious consumers of new releases, you barely had to recommend a film to them at all beyond it being “new this week.” One interesting thing I noticed were Films that had performed spectacularly well at the box office such as ‘Avengers Assemble’ were only mildly popular rentals, whereas slightly smaller films that still received significant coverage such as ‘The Bourne Legacy’ did phenomenally well. The top performers though were comedy and horror – the couple’s compromise.
While Blockbuster was in better shape than I had imagined, it was impossible to deny that it nowhere near its heyday and in slow decline. There were simply too many inevitable technological advances that would change people’s viewing habits, such as faster broadband and an influx of streaming and on demand services including those offering new releases.
Perhaps there was nothing that could be done to save the video shop being relegated to memory, but Blockbuster being the last remaining big player did itself no favours and could have stuck around longer with a bit of innovation. I Shouldn’t think the top managers with their six figure redundancies are too bothered. Nonetheless it boggles the mind that Blockbuster was not at the forefront of the no late fee postal service that gained Lovefilm 1.25 million customers. We would have had the advantage of also having physical shops that you could return the DVD’s too and instantly pick another. Blockbuster did eventually offer this but too little, too late.
Another awful decision from Blockbuster top brass was the shift in focus from customer service to sales – my job title changing from Customer Service Representative to Customer Sales Representative. While this was part of a larger trend in retail I found it particularly short sighted from Blockbuster given the massive threats from competitors who offered cheaper and more convenient services. Our only USP at that point was the personal touch – knowledgeable and passionate staff who could personally recommend films. We needed to give people a reason to continue to make the trip to the shop when they could just stream or get a DVD through the post – our response to people being sold on ease and convenience? Make the shopping experience unpleasant with constant up-selling.
The short-term benefits of up-selling were all that Manager’s cared about. The logic was that if we ask twenty people and one takes us up on it then that is an extra few quid that we wouldn’t have had. What did not show up on any spreadsheets however is that those 19 people who said no were all annoyed, instead of being able to have a relaxed chat about the films in the shop with staff they were greeted by sprung coils threatened with unemployment should they fail to meet their lofty sales targets. My interactions with customers at the till were scripted and mandated (I was told on a sales training course to picture every customer as a walking ten pound note.) and I could feel their seething resentment, how many of them decided they would rather just stream? Enough to put us out of business. They didn’t want to pre-order Men In Black 3 on blu-ray, they did not want three bags of popcorn for the price of two and they certainly didn’t want four films instead of one.
Ah yes, the 4 for £10 deal – the holy grail. A new release was £3.50 and a single film was what most people wanted, we had to try and get everyone to upgrade this to four films for three nights – a saving of £4 if you ignore the fact a moment ago you were only paying 3.50! I found this quite stunningly ignorant of people’s viewing habits and the lifestyles of our customers. Even if they were able to regularly afford to pay the £10, I was often greeted with stunned disbelief at the thought that they would have the time to watch four films in 3 days – if only life were that kind! Bring back those four films a day late and you’d face £6 in fees. Still we had to keep the number of single film rent transactions to below 50%, this makes complete mathematical sense from a business perspective but it lacked any thought on how this would affect the staff and how it would blight the experience for customers. This experience being our last remaining unique selling point.
Not only were we in trouble due to our rivals superior convenience, the thing that Lovefilm marketed hard was the lack of late fees. We charged £1.50 a day on new releases, so if you took a film out for £3.50 and left it in the glove box for a couple of days and had to pay a fine that would be a spend of £6.50 plus probably a modicum of stress as you remember you’ve forgotten to take it back. A lot of people knowing they had late fees on their account would just never come back. Meanwhile a Lovefilm subscription was £5.99 a month. Seeing this as suicidal business practice I suggested a radical revamp of the late fees system. We would only charge late fees on titles that were sold out at the time they should have been returned. In other words customers would only be charged when we actually lost out on money through the missed opportunity to rent a sold out title. Needless to say it was ignored, not even as much as an acknowledgment that late fees were handicapping the business model. A business model that was stubbornly stuck to even with the emergence of competitors and a withering retail market, a complete lack of anything resembling a response from the decision makers other than to naively think we could just make our few remaining customers spend more.
So I knew the business was in a vulnerable position but for whatever reason I took my job there seriously, in no small part because the experience of going into video shops had formed a large part of my childhood and beyond. I stole an idea from Waterstones and wrote mini-reviews for a lot of the smaller films and placed them in the sleeves increasing the amount of rents for Your Sister’s Sister, Ruby Sparks, Grave Encounters and Brake.
I even stuck up for the much maligned John Carter and got a few people to agree with me after watching! Talking with customers who were also interested in film was fun too and after being unemployed for quite a while I felt lucky to have the job. My manager was impressed with me and told me I was to start official manager training since I had already acted as de-facto assistant manager. It was in the morning she told me about my upcoming promotion, later that afternoon we went into administration.
What followed was not a nice experience. Since it had been on the news every customer asked about it which became draining and we didn’t know anything ourselves. After a few months of uncertainty we were bought by TS Operations and we waited anxiously to find out if we were to be one of the stores to close. In Norwich they were four Blockbuster stores, the one in Bowthorpe went first, the Dereham Road store had to close suddenly as a new lease could not be negotiated due to the death of the landlord and the biggest store in Mile Cross was also told they would be closing.
Leaving just us. The smallest store on Wroxham Road. We were given assurances that the business had new ideas going forward and that while there were many store closures and redundancies we were now in a healthy position. We phoned customers from all the other stores to assure them that we were still open and that they could transfer memberships over to us. Countless people asked us if we were now going to be staying in business and I said that we would, to the relief of our long time and loyal customers. Having been through months of uncertainty of being in administration our store was now in a good position since a lot of customers had migrated over, we were the most profitable in the region and one of the top performers in the UK. I was told my manager training would be arranged soon and failing to see this as a bad omen I met the news our store was to close with surprise. The landlord had begun looking for a new business when we had gone into administration and having had an offer he decided he would rather get Blockbuster out now rather than have to go through the same uncertainty again – he did not believe the company would be able to survive much longer and to his credit he was right.
We were told that they would be looking at trying to open a new store in Norwich in future, I knew this wouldn’t happen and a mere few months after we were forced out by our the landlord the entire company finally folded. Being made redundant and the months that preceded it were no fun at all, but before feeling too sorry for Blockbuster don’t forget they made many decisions or lack of decisions that shot themselves in the foot. Not only that but the reason that Blockbuster was the last major player left in the game was because they had already put everyone else out of business!
Blockbuster bullied smaller shops by buying in many copies of big new releases – so many that they often made a small loss, so that people would get used to never being disappointed when they came to Blockbuster. The smaller shops simply could not afford to buy in 30-40 copies of a new film when it would only be popular enough to justify buying that many on its day of release. This was at the time when video shops were transitioning from mini-library’s full of classic and older films to being geared almost completely to new releases, this change came as more people began to collect their favourite films and cable offered far more films on television.
Just as these smaller shops could not compete with the wants of customers in a changing culture – the same thing would spell the end for Blockbuster. Video shops are now incredibly rare with libraries being the best place to go to rent DVD/blu-ray now and although they usually have a large selection (The Millennium Library in Norwich’s World Cinema section is amazing.) it just doesn’t feel the same. Remarkably though, there is still one last remaining independent video shop in Norwich that I now go to – Starship Video.
I will relish it as long as it can stay open because once it is gone, for me, the magic of the video shop will be gone. Replaced by scrolling through Netflix – more convenient yes, but is it an experience to fall in love with? I fear not.
My longing to continue this experience is enough to make me want to move to Seattle, home to the amazing Scarecrow video which could well be the biggest video shop in the world.
Or perhaps I could move to Bristol where this little gem 20th Century Flicks is still going strong – at least I can sign up for their postage service
Is there still a video shop where you live? Let me know on Twitter or leave a comment!
Phil's Film Journal 