Yahoo Finance Revealed: the last Blockbuster store in Australia
Australia will be down to just one Blockbuster video rental store, and it will be a fierce race between it and the final US shopfront to claim the honour of the last in the world.
The second last Australian store, located in Westridge Shopping Centre in Toowoomba, will wind up next week after a six-week closing down sale.
And that’ll leave Morley, in the northeast of Perth, as the only Blockbuster physical shopfront remaining in the country, as first reported by WAtoday.
The Blockbuster store network once numbered in the hundreds in Australia (and thousands in the world) but with the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Stan in the past decade, physical rentals have gone out of favour.
In 2015, research firm Roy Morgan revealed Australian households ditched 800,000 DVD players since its peak in 2008. More than three years on, one can only guess how many people would even have a DVD player plugged into their television.
But as these Blockbuster-type stores disappear, many people recall with nostalgia their experiences in the local video rental parlour.
“I feel like it’s an experience – roaming the store and talking to a staff member that could offer a suggestion and share some of your favourites. You can’t get that from Netflix,” Blockbuster Westridge manager Melissa Carr told The Weekly Times.
The final franchise in the US — in Bend, Oregon — received much publicity last August when the second last in Alaska shut down despite well-meaning help from comedian John Oliver and actor Russell Crowe.
The Oregon store now has visitors from all over the country taking photos in front — a phenomenon that the Morley franchise is now seeing in Perth.
“Customers will come with friends from overseas and they would say, ‘oh my god, there is still a Blockbuster’,” owner Lyn Borszeky told WAtoday.
“It wasn’t until two weeks ago that we knew we would be the last one in Australia when we found out the Toowoomba store was closing, it has all been a bit crazy.”
Beyond the physical stores, the Blockbuster name lives on in Australia through DVD rental vending machines, commonly seen in shopping malls.
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