The Washington Post's business section reports that onetime video-rental king Blockbuster is considering a new business model while keeping its current storefronts open for the time being.
So, Blockbuster is in trouble. Gee, do ya think? And as the article above mentions, experts suggest that they didn't adapt quickly enough to a changing market. Tell me something I didn't know! It's truly amazing how frequently our supposedly innovative, adaptive business executives are slow to react to reality. Blockbuster was never as big as General Motors, but they suffered from the same blind hubris -- and so did their stockholders, eventually.
After all, my wife and I could see the handwriting on the wall at least two, maybe even three years ago; Netflix was already gaining market share and some stock analysts were still recommending Blockbuster because they had belatedly adopted a mail-delivery option as well. Too late. What we saw at our local Blockbuster stores (about half of which are now closed) included:
-- a continually dwindling selection of older films (it got to the point where it was hard to find anything that was more than three months old);
-- a contemporaneous focus on providing several billion copies of only the very latest movies;
-- an increase in empty space in the store, meaning less of anything to choose from;
-- more effort to sell DVDs rather than rent them;
-- greater space devoted to snacks;
-- and possibly worst of all, high prices -- $4 for a film that wasn't a new release, while many competitors around the country were selling the same for $1.
No wonder they're in trouble. But if I could see these signs, couldn't they?
The whole business of entertainment distribution is obviously in turmoil; some companies are adapting better than others. I'd predict the next casualty is likely to be Borders. Their stores are currently exhibiting some of the signs I saw at Blockbuster: reduced inventory, more empty space, increased focus on unrelated product lines (yoga mats?), late to the party on new trends (e-books), and increasingly desperate-sounding e-mail specials.
We've always bought a lot of books, and we recall when we walked into our first Borders store back in the early 80s, in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC. It was a store that would seem tiny by the standards of today's huge retail premises, yet it was like emerging from the black-and-white of Dorothy's Kansas into the brilliant color and merriment of Oz. What an amazing selection of books on all subjects! What a bewildering, unprecedented choice! At that time, neither independents (most of which focused on one niche or another) nor other chains (Barnes and Noble was still in the old mode of offering only the most popular and saleable titles) was offering anything like it.
Now, Borders stores are reducing their inventories; some sections are almost nonexistent. Barnes & Noble also has gone this route, though seemingly to a lesser extent (their selection was never as large as Borders's). I enjoy browsing as much as any booklover, but the dilemma is that browsing requires a huge selection that stores can't afford to maintain now. I used to be able to go to Borders and find a classic like Plato, a coffeetable book about trees, a recent novel, several choices of titles on the history of Germany, and/or a computer manual for a cumbersome software program. But if you searched for those things in recent months, you would find only the novel.
A story about Borders could be written today, similar to the one above about Blockbuster. Sadly it will probably be a year or more before we see it.