Fade to green

Fade to green

Front Row Seat video rental store maintains steady business
Front Row Seat manager Patricia Rivera sorts through the returned movies to restock the shelves.

Fade to green

Front Row Seat manager Patricia Rivera sorts through the returned movies to restock the shelves.
Blockbuster,

Movie Gallery; where are they now?

The long-lasting relationship between Front Row Seat video and Cortez is a rather remarkable feat.

The store didn't end up in the gutter like a number of previous video rental stores. Some may wonder what happened to the Blockbuster Video store inside City Market or the Movie Gallery located in the shopping center on Sligo Street.

These companies took a turn for the worse when movie-streaming gained popularity.

Blockbuster, once the No. 1 rental chain in the world for renting DVDs, was purchased by Dish Network in April 2011 for $100 million. Dr. Evil would have been ecstatic for that chunk of change, but Dish was indifferent.

When Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection in September 2010 they had approximately 9,000 stores operating worldwide. By August of 2012, they were down approximately 900 brick-and-mortar stores. Dish Network had plans to shutter even more but keep stores in rural regions open, where they believed that they could still turn a profit.

Many stores operates as by-mail or download only through their website www.blockbuster.com. An attempt to compete with Netflix through wireless broadband service went under in 2012.

Movie Gallery also went under in 2010 when it was forced to close all of the remaining operating stores around the United States. Citing net losses from $546.3 million to $1.4 million in 2009, they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2011. It would be the third bankruptcy claim the company filed in just three years.

Previously, Movie Gallery purchased Hollywood Video stores for $800 million, making it the second most popular video rental store in the country. However, the move was also a big reason for its demise. Movie Gallery also failed to keep business pace with the movie streaming company Netflix or the convenient kiosks of Redbox. When Movie Gallery closed its remaining stores, it had debts of $500 million to $1 billion with assets ranging from $10 million to $50 million.

Movie Gallery closed in Cortez in 2009 and Blockbuster closed soon after in 2010 leaving Front Row Seat as the only place in town to browse for movies.



rachels@cortezjournal.com