The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 12: A Final Visit

Most of these stories have focused on my time as a Blockbuster employee during the early 2000s, but I knew the store long before someone handed me a blue polo shirt. Throughout the nineties, and occasionally during the company's final years, I experienced Blockbuster from the other side of the counter. When I think about my childhood, I probably spent more time inside video stores than almost anywhere else. I visited arcades, comic shops, and movie theaters, but video stores gave me my real education in movies. Every shelf offered another genre, another actor, or another strange piece of cover art that suggested an entire world inside a plastic case. Our visits usually followed one of two patterns. On weekends, my father took my brother and me to the store, and we spent an hour wandering the aisles while he chose new releases and we searched for older movies or video games. Other times, he dropped me off, ran errands, and returned a few hours later. Nobody would leave a child…