There are a handful of remaining Blockbusters in the US — here’s a look inside

martin

8 years ago

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Blockbuster isn’t extinct quite yet.

At least 10 Blockbusters remain open across the US — a minuscule percentage of the 9,000 stores that existed in the early 1990s, the Washington Post reported. And, the biggest cluster of Blockbuster locations that remain open aren’t in the mainland US, but instead in Alaska.

“We just keep plodding along,” Alan Payne, a licensee who owns eight of the last surviving Blockbusters, told the Post. One of Payne’s locations is in Texas, and seven are in Alaska, where the chain continues to draw customers thanks to the frigid and long winter and expensive and slow WiFi.

Many Americans haven’t seen a Blockbuster — much less gone inside — since the company filed for bankruptcy in 2010. For Blockbuster lovers desperately missing the store and video rental virgins raised on Netflix, here’s what it’s like to visit one of the handful of remaining Blockbusters in the country.