Howard Greninger
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE —
Several former customers left with stacks of videos in arm Friday as a liquidation sale began for the last Blockbuster video store in Terre Haute.
Lisa and Andre Bonter of West Terre Haute went a step farther, buying a bubble gum machine from the video store on South Third Street.
“Every time we come to Blockbuster, my boys [age 5 and 11] say, ‘Mom, I got to get a gumball,’” Lisa Bonter said. “They are going to die when they see this.”
“I don’t like the fact that it is closing,” she quickly added. “We come here twice a week with my boys. I don’t want to order from the computer or Netflix or Redbox. I want to come down here physically with the kids to check out old movies. I like that, it is a family thing. I don’t like that everything is computerized.
“We will go to Family Video now,” she said. The couple moved to West Terre Haute about 11⁄2 years ago from California.
Andre Bonter has a link himself to some videos. Bonter said he was a drummer in the band “The Poor Boys,” assigned to Hollywood Records and owned by Walt Disney. “We had videos on MTV and in the movie, ‘The Mighty Ducks,’ the scene where Emilio Estevez gets pulled over, the music playing in his car is The Poor Boys, a song called ‘Hey Man.’
“We did [some movie soundtracks for] Captain Ron, Arachnophobia and Run, [a movie] with Patrick Dempsey, anything that was Disney. I was in the band from 1989 to 1994,” Andre Bonter said.
Blockbuster dominated the home video rental business for more than a decade, but has since fallen to Netflix and Redbox, a reflection of declining interest in renting DVDs from retail locations versus buying them via the Internet or from kiosks at grocery stores or other retail stores.
The company is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this month, according to the Associated Press. Blockbuster hopes to use time in Chapter 11 to restructure nearly $1 billion in debt and escape leases on 500 of its 3,425 stores in the U.S. The Dallas-based chain has closed nearly 1,000 stores in the past year.
Bill Ivester is the franchisee of the last Blockbuster video store in Terre Haute. Ivester is director of operations for Kyvid Entertainment of Louisville, Ky.
“The industry has changed quite a bit and we have to reassess each market. At one time, we had three stores here in Terre Haute — one south, here on Third Street and one north at the corner of 25th and Lafayette, which closed about two and a half to three years ago,” Ivester said.
Ivester said Kvyid Entertainment still operates a Blockbuster store in Bloomington and another in Jeffersonville. “We had as many as nine at once,” he said.
“This has been evolving over the last five or six years. The market has been changing with technology, with Netflix coming in, with Redbox and with downloading movies through cable services or places like that,” Ivester said.
“[Movie] Studios also began pushing sell-through more than in the past. The studios would prefer to sell it to you than rent it to you. They want you to buy the DVD for $17 to $20 at Walmart or Best Buy rather than rent it,” he said.
“The one option, basically, used to be if you wanted to watch a movie when it first came out on video, you went to a traditional brick and mortar video store. Now, you can download [off the Internet] or Netflix has struck deals with Sony, that if you have a Wii system, a Playstation 3 or XBox 360, you can stream through those,” Ivester said.
About 100 people quickly moved through the doors of the video store when it opened for its liquidation sale at noon on Friday. Ivester said one person bought 150 movies.
A liquidation sale will continue through September with doors open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Kelly and Jerry Farner rode a motorcycle to Blockbuster on Friday.
“I used to have a monthly plan for $19.99 a month for unlimited video rentals, but when they raised that, I quit coming. I was a loyal, real loyal customer before that, coming two to three times a week,” Kelly Farner said.
“I was surprised to see them go,” she said.
Jerry Farner said the couple would likely go to Family Video now when passing through Terre Haute. Farner said he prefers a video store to kiosks like Redbox, which he said “only has so many movies, maybe 30 or so.”
Mike Miller, a resident of Goshen working on a construction project at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, visited the Blockbuster store Friday after spotting “a large group of people” outside the store.
“I am shocked in a way at the closing as videos are still cheaper entertainment than going to a movie theater. I think the problem is movies on the Internet are so available,” Miller said.
Howard Greninger can be reached at (812) 231-4204 or howard.greninger@tribstar.com.
