Page 25 - ARUBA TODAY

BUSINESS Saturday 23 March 2019
A25

Oregon Blockbuster outlasts others to become last on Earth

By GILLIAN FLACCUS Tourists started stopping by
Associated Press to snap selfies, and busi-
BEND, Ore. (AP) — There ness picked up. Harding or-
are challenges that come dered up blue-and-yellow
with running the last Block- sweat shirts, T-shirts, cups,
buster Video on the planet. magnets, bumper stickers,
The computer system must hats and stocking caps
be rebooted using floppy from local vendors embla-
disks that only the general zoned with the words “The
manager — a solid mem- Last Blockbuster in Ameri-
ber of Gen X — knows ca,” and they flew off the
how to use. The dot-matrix shelves.
printer broke, so employ- Then, this month, she got
ees write out membership a phone call: The world’s
cards by hand. And the only other Blockbuster, in
store’s business transac- Perth, Australia, would soon
tions are backed up on a close its doors.
reel-to-reel tape that can’t A new T-shirt order went out
be replaced because Ra- — this time with the slogan
dio Shack went out of busi- “The Last Blockbuster on
ness. the Planet” — and the store
Yet none of that has kept is already getting a new
this humble franchise in wave of selfie-snapping
an Oregon strip mall from visitors from as far away as
thriving as the advent of Local documentary filmmakers Taylor Morden, left, and Zeke Kamm, pose at the last Blockbuster Europe and Asia.
on-demand movie stream- on the planet in Bend, Ore., on Monday, March 11, 2019. On a recent weekday,
ing laid waste all around it. Associated Press Michael Trovato of Mel-
When a Blockbuster in Aus- member who they went and Fairbanks, Alaska, shut Oregon, store — Bend’s bourne, Australia, stopped
tralia shuts its doors for the with and that freedom of down last summer — bare- Blockbuster was the only by while visiting his twin sis-
last time on March 31, the walking the aisles,” said ly outlasting a Redmond, U.S. location left. ter in Bend.q
Bend store will be the only Zeke Kamm, a local resi-
one left on Earth. dent who is making a doc-
“It’s pure stubbornness, for umentary about the store
one. We didn’t want to called “The Last Blockbust-
give in,” said general man- er” with a friend.
ager Sandi Harding, who “In a lot of towns, the Block-
has worked at the franchise buster was the only place
for 15 years and receives a that was open past nine
lot of the credit for keeping o’clock, and a lot of them
it alive well past its expira- stayed open until midnight,
tion date. so kids who weren’t hood-
“We did everything we lums would come here and
could to cut costs and look at movies and fall in
keep ourselves relevant.” love with movies.”
The store was once one of The Bend store had eight
five Blockbusters owned years under its belt as a
by the same couple, Ken local video store before it
and Debbie Tisher, in three converted to a Blockbuster
central Oregon towns. But in 2000, a time when this
by last year, the Bend fran- high desert city was still a
chise was the last local sleepy community with a
Blockbuster standing. small-town feel to match.
A tight budget meant no Customers kept coming
money to update the sur- back, drawn by special
viving store. That’s paying touches like staff recom-
off now with a nostalgia mendations, a “wish list” for
factor that stops first-time videos to add to the rental
visitors of a certain age in selection and even home
their tracks: the popcorn delivery for a few special
ceilings, low fluorescent customers who couldn’t
lighting, wire metal video drive in. Dozens of local
racks and the ubiquitous teens have worked there
yellow-and-blue ticket stub over the years.
logo that was a cultural Then, in 2010, Blockbuster
touchstone for a genera- declared bankruptcy, and
tion. by 2014, all corporate-
“Most people, I think, when owned stores had shut-
they think about renting tered. That left locally
videos — if they’re the right owned franchises to fend
age — they don’t remem- for themselves, and one by
ber the movie that they one, they closed.
went to pick, but they re- When stores in Anchorage