Why did Blockbuster have late fees anyway? Why was the DVD the thing that probably really killed Blockbuster and is there any scenario where Blockbuster not Netflix could have won? Be kind. Rewind with us today. Rad 80s 90s history podcast recounting. The last time things were relatively normal and chill, the last two decades of the 20th century, I'm your host, Brian McCullough.

Today we're going to talk about a dearly departed landmark in both media and retail before the internet came around and

changed everything. My amazing special guest is investor and tech writer but

just writer in general I suppose suppose, M.G.

Welcome to 80's 90s history.

Thanks for having me, Brian.

Good to be here.

You strike me as a movie guy.

So tell me your relationship with the dearly departed blockbuster video or actually just the video rental store of your youth full stop.

Yeah, I have a pretty romantic and nostalgic past with regard to video stores. I grew up in Ohio and where I lived they had a sort of a local mom and pop video shop for for many years that we would go to

This was the old school days of definitely VHS, but they even they would do this fun little thing where they had like dog tags that they would make you take off of sort of the the cover of the video because they would keep all the videos in the back so no one would steal them I assume.

And so if it had a dog tag you knew that the video was available and you would walk that

up to the counter and then go rent it.

And so that's where I, you know, sort of grew up and got my start going to video stores.

That was replaced shortly thereafter, not by Blockbuster, by another video store, which I remember the name of because I was a little bit older and going to it called Flix

which was also just a local

video store in Ohio and outside of Cleveland, Ohio.

And that's the one where Blockbuster first came on my radar

because there was a blockbuster that moved about

two or three blocks away from that store, you know, when I was, I think, maybe early teens.

And that, you know, as we'll talk about, had all sorts of disruptive you know areas in that in

that world and so it was interesting flixix, the, again, the sort of more mom and pop lake store,

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