The Last Remaining Blockbuster Is Selling Merch To Make Money
There is still one last Blockbuster store left in the world, and it is selling merch in an attempt to make enough money to stick around.
20 years ago, video rental stores were the place to be. Similar to the fact that not all cola is Coca-Cola, and not all plasters are band-aids, even though it's the collective term most people use for video rental stores, not all of them are Blockbusters. However, when most people reminisce about times when we needed to leave the house to get a movie we wanted to watch at home, they think of the blue and yellow neon lights of Blockbuster.
For the good people of Bend, Oregon, those memories are far more recent than they are for the rest of the world. That's because, believe it or not, Bend still has a Blockbuster. It's the last one in the world and people still go there to rent DVDs and Blu-rays. Hard to believe in a world where almost 200 million people have subscribed to Netflix.
Bend's Blockbuster might still be open, but chances are it isn't exactly thriving. It's a novelty, that's for sure, and chances are people visit the store from miles around just to get that nostalgia hit. However, those people aren't going to be renting movies. That's why the store has decided to start selling merchandise. Something for its visitors to buy that they don't have to return three days later.
Visitors to the last ever Blockbuster can buy t-shirts, cups, key rings, even a Blockbuster party game that comes in a retro VHS case. The prices aren't exactly high either, and cost what anyone would expect to pay for a souvenir from a tourist attraction. Even better, people who don't live anywhere near Bend can buy the merch on the final Blockbuster's website.
It would be interesting to discover what the balance is at this point for Bend's Blockbuster between rental store and tourist attraction. Whether the store still has a dedicated group of customers that returns on a regular basis to rent movies, or if it relies largely on the novelty of being the world's last remaining Blockbuster. Whatever the balance, we hope it continues to make enough money to remain in business.
Source: Bend Blockbuster
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