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An Ode to Blockbuster and Other [Video Rental Stores]
Posts
Yes it was. It still there?
I have a friend that still swears by this... She also has everything hooked up to her tv via SD connections (it's an HD tv) and only buys "full screen" movies.
Frustrating...
I wonder if there's still a thriving market for video rentals in ethnic communities. I remember my grandmother (up until 4 years ago when I last saw her) was renting a lot of Japanese shows taped from their original broadcast onto cassettes and mailed to various stores.
She also introduced me and my cousins to Kage no Gundam this way.
I gotta say, I'm mildly impressed by people who went through all that expense and effort just to pirate a low-quality copy of a vhs movie.
I mean, it must have taken what like 20 movies just to break even on the cost of the second VCR.
Or you could just learn to program your VCR, get an HBO subscription, and record ALL THE MOVIES.
Oh man, Lethal Weapon Marathon this weekend, better buy a new blank tape so I can get all three on one! Score!
Or 2 Disney movies. Which is what half the people I knew who did it used it for.
Were Disney movies super expensive in the 80's for some reason?
I was so jazzed to hear that blu-ray was only going to be in original theatrical aspect.
Because fuck the luddites. If you don't like doing things the right way, keep watching your betamax tapes.
Yeah, pretty much the same way they are now. You'll almost never find a Disney movie on sale at the store, and they're always priced about 30% than the other videos. Disney has long practiced the "false scarcity" theory of economics.
It was worse when VHS was a thing, since parents would play those things non-stop for their kids and the tapes would wear out at around 25 plays.
When the original Xbox was released, we had our systems a week in advance. We opened one and would play Halo every night after closing in the store. The first one we opened was actually DOA. We couldn't exactly tell the boss we'd been playing Halo on the clock, so we just taped it back up and sold it, and waited for it to come back as a return.
I worked through the switch from "movies due at midnight" to "movies due at noon." Probably the most miserable time there. Even though it was an actual extension of the rental time, an extra 12 hours, people constantly claimed we'd shortened the time and no one had told them. This despite the fact there were gigantic signs all over the store, on the entrance and exit doors, on every single rental box, and on the return drop box. No amount of logic (you had TWELVE EXTRA HOURS and were still late!) mattered. When we'd refuse to refund late fees, they'd call the district manager who'd tell us to refund it, even though it was a legit late fee. Then when our monthly numbers came out and our refunds were through the roof, she'd scream at us for giving too many refunds. We hated our district manager. But we got revenge, more on that later...
Ah, the drop box. When they were due at midnight, everyone with late fees claimed they'd returned their movie before midnight and we just hadn't checked the box. (Checking the box was the last thing we did, to make sure even the stragglers that were dropped after midnight got marked as on time). When they were due at noon, everyone claimed they'd been in before noon. (The system didn't start marking movies late until 2pm.) I once had my life threatened over a $3.98 late fee.
My second year there, my annual raise was a nickel. Five cents. That same year in one of the industry mags there was a piece on John Antioco, who owned the company at the time, talking about how the company was doing so well, he'd given himself a five million dollar Christmas bonus. You can guess how much any of the employees cared about Blockbuster after that.
Blockbuster started selling DirecTV systems in-store, and I got picked to be one of the two salespeople. It wasn't so bad really, I lived in a somewhat rural area at the time not well served by cable, so a lot of people were interested. Plus it was a $10 "commission" every sale I made. Of course, when the commission checks were supposed to go out, 6 months after the start of sales, DirecTV execs went "well, uh, by our numbers, Blockbuster didn't sell enough systems to trigger the commission payments, so nobody gets their checks." Surprisingly, Blockbuster execs didn't roll over, pointed out that DirecTV's numbers were twelve kinds of bullshit, threatened a lawsuit, and two weeks later I had a check in my hand.
One fall, Blockbuster decided they were going to "save money" by not letting any store do sundries orders from October to February. This meant no bags, no paper, no extra rental boxes, no cleaning supplies, no office supplies, no receipt paper, no Blockbuster cards. No. Toilet. Paper. So our store manager put through a nearly $15,000 sundries order right before the deadline, about 5 times the normal order. It cleared and got shipped before the district manager got wind of it. She was furious, naturally. But there was nothing she could do about it, Blockbuster corporate wasn't taking the stuff back. Come mid-December, we're the only store in the district that has supplies, she's telling us to send stuff to other stores who are out of things like product bags and TP, our store manager is telling her to go fuck herself. Someone in Blockbuster corporate finally realized that having stores with no bags for customers to carry things out of the store in at Christmas was a bad idea and the ordering system got reactivated.
Three months in a row, while doing inventory, one employee kept coming up as the last employee to have rented out dozens of movies and games that came up as "missing" on the inventory report. The report showed his employee number as who checked them out, they got checked back under a different number but weren't in the store. And there were dozens of them like that, across every category. This is usually a sign that someone is stealing, by checking stuff out then manually "returning" the items by punching in the barcode numbers instead of scanning. We told our store manager about it, he told the district manager about it after the first inventory, she told us we just didn't know how to do our jobs, obviously we were missing things. So my friend and I started checking timestamps for when stuff went out and came back. We went through hours of store security video, watching the one employee check something out, then "return" things using one of the assistant manager's employee numbers, punching it in by hand. We gave the evidence to the store manager, he went directly to the regional manager, who showed up at the store a day later and took the suspect employee in the back, who promptly broke down and admitted everything. Grand total: Nearly $5000 in VHS and DVDs, a rental DVD player, and a rental PS2, about 90% of which he still had in his possession and returned, which netted him just a misdemeanor theft charge instead of a felony.
Our district manager hated the shit out of us after that, because we told the regional manager we'd brought it all to her attention 2 months previous and she'd blown us off. She only lasted another 3 months though fortunately, terminated for incompetence. Apparently our report to the regional manager made him curious and he started poking around, and realized she was shit at her job but good at hiding it.
The last year I was there, a cop came in, looking for the other assistant manager. Of course we asked why. The cop was investigating reports the assistant manager had filmed a 17 year old girl having sex. It only got better from there. They arrested the manager, searched his house. Found three garbage bags worth of pictures he'd taken of people having sex. Found dozens of video tapes of people he'd filmed. The police called the store manager two days later. Asked, could he come down to the station, some of the pictures and video they'd found had Blockbuster logos in them, would he mind trying to identify people in them. So my store manager goes down to the police station. He's gone two hours. He's a big guy, Polish, in his 50s, former fire chief, still an EMT, swift water rescue rated, can be super imposing. He comes back, roars through the parking lot in his truck, skidding stop in the fire lane in front of the store. Marches through the door, down the length of the store into the back, flings the office door open. We're up front just staring at each other. The office door flies open again, he's got the office chair over his head, marches back up the length of the store, out the exit, to the dumpster, slams the chair into the dumpster, and tears out of the parking lot in his truck again. Comes back half an hour later with a new office chair. We ask him, "Ron, what the hell was that?" He goes, "If you saw what I saw, what went on in that chair, you'd never want to sit in it again either." The assistant manager had been filming porn in the office. Two other employees had been involved in it. They all got fired with extreme prejudice.
When I started there, we were a "C" store, meaning gross revenue was under $750k a year. We hit "B" store status the last year I was there, improving by over $350k total. This was supposed to trigger a $10k bonus to the store manager. But Blockbuster execs decided to deny him the bonus. He was understandably furious, and quit.
I thought about quitting then too, but I only had 3 months to college, so I stuck around through the new store manager they hired who was a complete idiot, then quit a month before classes started and that was it for me. Two months later, the idiot store manager closed the store for the night on a Sunday, took the deposit (from Friday, Saturday and Sunday since we made deposits in the morning and the bank wasn't open on weekends), and skipped town.
There are other little stories, we had a kid poop in one of the aisles, we had a burly redneck break down crying when we caught him shoplifting, we had a drunk woman leave her still-running car with baby inside in the fire lane while she "just came inside for something quick" who we stopped from leaving until the police showed up, but that's the big stuff. Other than that, the job was just mostly awful.
Oh, one year we met our Blockbuster Gift Card Sales Quota by using the no-charge account (a generic account for people who didn't have a Blockbuster account but just wanted to buy things, not rent) to "sell" gift cards, then use the same gift card to pay for itself. Since the system wasn't set up to refuse gift card payments on gift card purchases. Number one in the district that year.
That Blockbuster managed to hold on until about a year ago. It's a Zumba Fitness now.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Ten bucks says she views all those full-screen movies in stretched-across-the-whole-screen mode, too.
I make tweet.
OH GOD NO
The best is when you've got non-anamorphic movies, and they watch them in stretch mode, so that everybody looks three feet tall and two hundred pounds.
I tried for years to get my ex to understand the "Aspect" button. I called it the "make it look good' button. All. you. have. to. fucking. do. is. hit. it. until. the. picture. looks. good.
Letterboxed SD content. Hit it until it hits the "make letterboxed HD content take up the full wide screen" mode. But you don't need to know that. There's no menu. It's a single button. JUST KEEP HITTING IT UNTIL THE PICTURE DOESN'T LOOK STUPID GODDAMN
Yes... Though I got her a 360 with Netflix and an HDMI cable so hopefully she's accepted widescreen now.
I came over one evening while they were watching something all stretched to fuck, grabbed the remote and changed it, and then got bitched out for "putting black bars on the sides of the screen."
Typically after I've seen a movie, even one I enjoyed a great deal, I have no desire to see it again.
My family often watches in strech-o-vision. I don't know WTF is wrong with them. And my dad used to try and buy me movies in fullscreen.
And God, fucking pan and scan. The last pan and scan movie I watched was The Professional with my friend. We made it like ... 20 minutes in and then we both looked at each other and were like "This is the worst thing ever".
Lots of people rewatch movies.
I rewatch some, like the Bourne movies or Lord of the Rings, almost yearly.
Or holiday movies.
I GUESS I could go buy new copies but I can't find the editions I like. CURSE YOU LUCAAAAAAAAAAAAAS
I'm also a big proponent of movie collecting and I've got a nice collection of about 250 blu-rays. Buying movies is addictive. Speaking of blu-rays, it really bugs me when people use the wrong term for them. They're not blue-rays, or BRs, or even BRDs. It's either blu-rays, or simply BDs. ;)
3DS - 1289-8245-3817
Goodbye Borders
Nod. Get treat. PSN: QuipFilter
I know why it is, and I'm used to it. Still, in a perfect world it would be nice if everything would just play nice while at the same time making sure nothing is being cut or displayed incorrectly.
PSN: TheWolfman64 3DS/Pokemon Y: 0774-4614-4065/NNID: the_wolfman64
I still remember that one time when I was a kid and my father was driving us all to the video rental place to return the movies and get new ones -- except he left the VHS tapes on the roof of the car.
They didn't fall off until we were on a fairly major road, and they immediately got run over by a truck.
So my father calls up the video rental place and asks, you know, hypothetically, if the video was "lost", how much he would owe them to replace it, and it was like eighty dollars.
So he (I swear I am not making this up) grabs the magnetic tape from the run-over video cassette and cracks open some old home video that we hadn't watched in forever and puts the tape from the rental movie in the other cassette, and then peels the label from the rental tape and glues it onto the other cassette, and returns it.
We tested it before returning it and it worked... okay. Sort of. I'd taken home movies in worse shape from that rental place.
In the years I've been on the forums I have seen some crazy work stories, but I think this easily the most batshit retarded business practice I have ever heard of. Goddamn.
Hey!. I like Ghosts of Mars. In a campy B-movie way. But I still like it.
Also yeah, used to hit the rental place all the time. Now its all netflix. The rental place was an experience. Also it forces you to get out and not be a shut-in.
Either everyone in the chain of command was trying to get fired or most of them were and the others were afraid to say something.
The only thing that makes any kind of sense is some short term financial crunch or something. Like if they had a big loan repayment they needed all the liquid cash on hand for. It's still pretty fucking stupid, especially over what I would assume would be the busier time of year.
Nod. Get treat. PSN: QuipFilter
Nod. Get treat. PSN: QuipFilter
I fucking HATE how no one can goddamn decide on an aspect ratio for anything. Especially TVs. Every single new TV you use, it's like some sort of crazy guessing game as to how to get the TV to show the goddamn picture properly.
I hate stretch-o-vision, but I get why people end up using it. It's just easier.
There's a TV at my job that is never correct. The closest you can come to the right ratio still cuts the top and bottom edge off, so fuck you if you want to know what the football score is.
BURN THE WITCH
Agreed. For my "just getting out of the house" now I take my Nook to Barnes and Noble.
Which'll probably be closing soon.
Wanna meet up and hang out by the Redbox? :/
My store was super hardcore about checking the labels to make sure a tape hadn't been tampered with. You know that 'if this label is removed or altered you pay for that shit' label? Yeah.
Apparently my specific store had had an issue just a couple years back involving a young child and a Barney video that, at some point about ten minutes in, became NOT a Barney video because some fuck thought it would be funny. They sued, and I believe they got a decently-sized settlement.
Assuming it's an HDTV, with the content source (cable, BluRay player, etc) hooked up through HDMI or HD Component, I have never had any sort of issue getting something like that set up correctly. TV shows will either fill the screen or have black bars on the sides, depending on how it was filmed, and films will either fill the screen, or have black bars as they display as large as possible while preserving the original ratio.
Are there HDTVs that aren't a 16:9 ratio? Every 720 or 1080 resolution TV I've ever seen has been 16:9.
The only thing I could see having an issue with would be non-anamorphic DVD, which is just all around terrible anyway.
I'm sure I'm missing something here.