For more than 30 years, Ron Debello has been a loyal customer at his local Blockbuster.
After he retired, the former landscaper, 72, began going in daily to peruse the same shelves he had raided for decades.
With his membership, he can swap two rentals out as many times as he wants, meaning he can tear through dozens of films for $29 a month (£29).
But Mr Debello’s daily routine is one only a select few are lucky enough to enjoy because he lives in Bend – a small mountain town in Oregon, which boasts the world’s last surviving Blockbuster.
“It surprises the heck out of me”, Mr Debello says while scanning the new releases section.
“Out of all the places Blockbuster had, why is Bend the last one?”
In 2004, before streaming and online shopping took off, the then-video rental giant Blockbuster had more than 9,000 shops, including more than 500 in the UK.
But 10 years later, amid stiff competition from Netflix and a mounting debt pile, Blockbuster closed all of its corporate outlets, leaving 50 franchises to fend for themselves.
​
As the locations slowly dropped off, the shop in Bend defied the odds to stay open.
In 2018, when two locations in Anchorage, Alaska, closed, it became the last Blockbuster in the US.
The next year, the penultimate location in Morley, Western Australia, followed suit, leaving Bend out in the cold.
“They reached out on their last night and said goodbye and wished us well. That was kind of emotional because we were like ‘Oh man, we are it’,” recounts manager Sandi Harding, 52, who has worked at the store for 24 years.
“We just kind of rode it out while everybody kind of fell away. Here we are going on our fifth year [of being the world’s last location] and we’re still going strong.”
Nestled next to Papa Murphy’s takeaway pizza, the Blockbuster has become a tourist destination, with thousands of people making the pilgrimage every year to bask in the hazy, yellow nostalgia.
Visitors have travelled from as far as Qatar, Australia and South Korea to walk on the mottled, blue carpet squares and look at scores of physical DVDs once again.
Almost everything inside the shop is exactly the same as in the company’s heyday, from the butter-yellow walls to the strip lighting and the drop box for returns.
The computers haven’t been updated – they are the same ones they used in the 1990s, with floppy disks and no internet access.
This is just down 3rd St from me. It’s definitely a nostalgia trip.
I worked for Sandi when Bend had 4 Blockbuster locations. She could be pretty mean at times but overall a pretty good manager. Now all that’s left is the north side location. People show up from all over to get pictures with the sign and just to rent a movie or two while they are in town for skiing or floating the River. I still have my blockbuster account number memorized from working there and can confirm that nothing has changed. MS-DoS is still the operating system and the boob tube TV’s around the place still play random 90’s movies. Bend people have always been nostalgic or weird enough to hold onto blockbuster. It’s just surprising that we were the only ones to do so…
I feel like I’ve been reading someone else’s take on the last blockbuster for so many years now. I can still find a family video nearby but those have really closed up since the pandemic, I wonder when we’ll get that article.
Before people immediately start blaming Blockbuster’s downfall solely on the decision to not buy Netflix back in the day – it was actually their boneheaded decision to remove late fees that destroyed the company.
I used to go there in the late 90’s to early 2000’s (along with the Hollywood Video that used to be not far from there). So weird they’re the last one!
I have such nostalgia about blockbuster. I used to spend so much time there as a kid walking around, looking at the covers. I’d spend all my money on rentals, not clothes. I feel like something has really been lost in the move away from physical media.
Streaming has really made access to both movies and TV shows convenient for a lot of people. Remember the time it took someone to drive to a video store, spend gas money and money for the movie, and then have to spend it all over again just to return what you rented?
That $1-6 rental for a movie digitally (unless it’s offered for free temporarily on a streaming service via sub) is pretty much as good as its going to get for a lot of people in the world right now, which is unfortunately why physical media rentals have dropped out. Redbox, Gamefly, and various libraries across the country are the last bastions of physical media rentals, now that Netflix is out of the DVD rental business fully. And not everyone will have access to an internet connection to watch a movie.
And at the same time, home media ownership has also gotten pretty cheap to do under certain circumstances. For many years, DVDs of movies can be scored for dirt cheap, especially during holiday sales – The problem is its going to be getting harder now.
Best Buy is getting out of physical media to make their store spaces more profitable. Walmart’s cutting back but isn’t out of it yet. Target is also cutting back but isn’t out of it yet. Gamestop, however? There was a leakage of internal information for a store regarding a “movie section”. And then there’s Amazon, who can distribute physical media but will lock it behind shipping costs/fees.
All I can say is bless this last Blockbuster for keeping the spirit of old school media rentals alive. Because unless people decide to cut the streaming and support more physical media rental/ownership, we’re inching closer to an all-digital future.
“It’s the holiday season, slow news week from Christmas to new years, I guess let’s run another article about the last blockbuster?”
9 comments
**From The Telegraph:**
​
For more than 30 years, Ron Debello has been a loyal customer at his local Blockbuster.
After he retired, the former landscaper, 72, began going in daily to peruse the same shelves he had raided for decades.
With his membership, he can swap two rentals out as many times as he wants, meaning he can tear through dozens of films for $29 a month (£29).
But Mr Debello’s daily routine is one only a select few are lucky enough to enjoy because he lives in Bend – a small mountain town in Oregon, which boasts the world’s last surviving Blockbuster.
“It surprises the heck out of me”, Mr Debello says while scanning the new releases section.
“Out of all the places Blockbuster had, why is Bend the last one?”
In 2004, before streaming and online shopping took off, the then-video rental giant Blockbuster had more than 9,000 shops, including more than 500 in the UK.
But 10 years later, amid stiff competition from Netflix and a mounting debt pile, Blockbuster closed all of its corporate outlets, leaving 50 franchises to fend for themselves.
​
As the locations slowly dropped off, the shop in Bend defied the odds to stay open.
In 2018, when two locations in Anchorage, Alaska, closed, it became the last Blockbuster in the US.
The next year, the penultimate location in Morley, Western Australia, followed suit, leaving Bend out in the cold.
“They reached out on their last night and said goodbye and wished us well. That was kind of emotional because we were like ‘Oh man, we are it’,” recounts manager Sandi Harding, 52, who has worked at the store for 24 years.
“We just kind of rode it out while everybody kind of fell away. Here we are going on our fifth year [of being the world’s last location] and we’re still going strong.”
Nestled next to Papa Murphy’s takeaway pizza, the Blockbuster has become a tourist destination, with thousands of people making the pilgrimage every year to bask in the hazy, yellow nostalgia.
Visitors have travelled from as far as Qatar, Australia and South Korea to walk on the mottled, blue carpet squares and look at scores of physical DVDs once again.
Almost everything inside the shop is exactly the same as in the company’s heyday, from the butter-yellow walls to the strip lighting and the drop box for returns.
The computers haven’t been updated – they are the same ones they used in the 1990s, with floppy disks and no internet access.
​
**Read the article here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/26/blockbuster-rental-films-dvds-bend-oregon/**
This is just down 3rd St from me. It’s definitely a nostalgia trip.
I worked for Sandi when Bend had 4 Blockbuster locations. She could be pretty mean at times but overall a pretty good manager. Now all that’s left is the north side location. People show up from all over to get pictures with the sign and just to rent a movie or two while they are in town for skiing or floating the River. I still have my blockbuster account number memorized from working there and can confirm that nothing has changed. MS-DoS is still the operating system and the boob tube TV’s around the place still play random 90’s movies. Bend people have always been nostalgic or weird enough to hold onto blockbuster. It’s just surprising that we were the only ones to do so…
I feel like I’ve been reading someone else’s take on the last blockbuster for so many years now. I can still find a family video nearby but those have really closed up since the pandemic, I wonder when we’ll get that article.
Before people immediately start blaming Blockbuster’s downfall solely on the decision to not buy Netflix back in the day – it was actually their boneheaded decision to remove late fees that destroyed the company.
I used to go there in the late 90’s to early 2000’s (along with the Hollywood Video that used to be not far from there). So weird they’re the last one!
I have such nostalgia about blockbuster. I used to spend so much time there as a kid walking around, looking at the covers. I’d spend all my money on rentals, not clothes. I feel like something has really been lost in the move away from physical media.
Streaming has really made access to both movies and TV shows convenient for a lot of people. Remember the time it took someone to drive to a video store, spend gas money and money for the movie, and then have to spend it all over again just to return what you rented?
That $1-6 rental for a movie digitally (unless it’s offered for free temporarily on a streaming service via sub) is pretty much as good as its going to get for a lot of people in the world right now, which is unfortunately why physical media rentals have dropped out. Redbox, Gamefly, and various libraries across the country are the last bastions of physical media rentals, now that Netflix is out of the DVD rental business fully. And not everyone will have access to an internet connection to watch a movie.
And at the same time, home media ownership has also gotten pretty cheap to do under certain circumstances. For many years, DVDs of movies can be scored for dirt cheap, especially during holiday sales – The problem is its going to be getting harder now.
Best Buy is getting out of physical media to make their store spaces more profitable. Walmart’s cutting back but isn’t out of it yet. Target is also cutting back but isn’t out of it yet. Gamestop, however? There was a leakage of internal information for a store regarding a “movie section”. And then there’s Amazon, who can distribute physical media but will lock it behind shipping costs/fees.
All I can say is bless this last Blockbuster for keeping the spirit of old school media rentals alive. Because unless people decide to cut the streaming and support more physical media rental/ownership, we’re inching closer to an all-digital future.
“It’s the holiday season, slow news week from Christmas to new years, I guess let’s run another article about the last blockbuster?”