The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 6: The Folks Behind the Counter

Working at Blockbuster brought me into contact with personalities I never would have encountered in my sheltered life. Some of my coworkers were kind. Some were reckless. A few were complete disasters. Every one of them taught me something about the adult world, even when the lesson was simply that age and maturity were not the same thing. Those people made Blockbuster memorable. The movies provided the setting, but the cast changed constantly. Every so often, Coca Cola ran a promotion with Blockbuster. We loved promotional periods because they allowed us to wear t-shirts instead of the standard blue polo with the gold collar. Occasionally, there were prizes. One such contest involved selling twenty-ounce Coke products with movie rentals. None of us wanted to annoy every customer by delivering a sales pitch, so we made almost no effort. Somehow, either through naturally high sales or a clerical mistake, our store won. The prize was a paid trip to a Memphis Redbirds baseball game.…