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Blockbuster is monopolizing the home movie industry, this corporate evil wants to buy out Hollywood Video so they can have no real competition. If they don't budge they say they are going to take it to the shareholders. They also offer the online rentals at a lower price than netflix to drive customers away, they can afford to since they have other sources of income.No one company should control an entire market, they have put some of my favorite mom and pop shops out of business that often had better prices (at the time) and a more diverse movie selection.

They now offer trading - there is a local Dallas company here called the "Movie Trading Company" that is very popular with this business and it appears blockbuster is trying to push them out as well.
They have become the new Walmart.

It seems much the story that a small operation starts a business and makes it successful and bigger companies come along thinking that is a good idea and buy up or put out of business the smaller companies. Of course Wal-mart and Microsoft are interesting examples of companies that have grown too big for their britches but started out small. An interesting example, from a photographer's perspective, of a corporation trying to monopolize on a fad and instead destroying it was Glamour Shots. Smaller studios did this type of photography and when it became popular a larger corporation tried to franchise this. Of course it was overkill and they hurt themselves and others. Getting back on the subject, our local video store, which has been here for years has been holding on strong, even though Hollywood Video does have a store in town. It is interesting that Blockbuster tried to make a go of it and could not compete with the local store. This town has a weird fascination with not trusting outsiders.--Bob

It's funny, there are supposed to be laws to protect healthy competition, but you never see the government getting in the way of big mergers that aren't likely to be good for anyone.

I was just thinking of this recently, how so many little stores took a chance on this new video rental thing in the 70s and early 80s, made a success of it, and once it became popular enough, the corporations came in and stamped them all out. Now the big guys are eating each other.

And, as you said, every time a business comes along with a different idea, to possibly carve out a niche for itself (net rentals, trading, etc.), Blockbuster grabs it for their own. It's disgusting.

I'm all for free enterprise, but there is a point where it stops benefitting anyone but a few executives and large shareholders. Personally, I think the bigger Blockbuster gets, the worse it gets, in terms of service and selection.

Small, private businesses need to be protected.

We have two independent video stores in the area that are actually succeeding. One is the first in the city, which is also part of a large and established electronics store. They have a pretty fair selection.

The other actually focuses on genre films, foreign, cult, classic, anime, etc., and is run by people who know what they're talking about and genuinely love movies. It probably helps that this is a university town. They also put a major investment into DVDs a few years ago, including a lot of titles they already had. They had a huge DVD section when even Blockbuster was just adding a few. It's my favourite video store, and I want to support it, but they don't make it easy. Rentals are expensive, you only get them for two days, and the late fee is full rental price.

Post Edited (12-29-04 13:32)

Hella tight! Take that! (oh wait you already said that)

God I remember when the blockbuster down my street had movies that you would find in Mom and Pop videos, they use to have Pigs AKA Daddies Deadly Darling. PIGS for christs sakes they once had PIGS!!!!

Hollywood video is SLIGHTLY more mom and Pop but my favorite video store is this once place called Flicks and Picks, good god they still have the Gamera movies that I watched when I was a really little kid and the X from Outer Space. DIE CORPORATIONS DIE!!!!!

AndyC:

I'm all for free enterprise, but there is a point where it stops benefitting anyone but a few executives and large shareholders. Personally, I think the bigger Blockbuster gets, the worse it gets, in terms of service and selection.

Small, private businesses need to be protected.

Sorry, but if you're in favor of protection, you're not "all for" free enterprise, by definition. True laissez-faire economics may recognize a need for regulation to protect consumers from harmful or unethical products and practices, but not to artificially and consciously to modify or balance the market. After all, that's what pure capitalism is: The attempt to make one's business more profitable than all competitors.

Just about everyone who professes a trust in the free market finds out their own personal limit for how far they'll trust that free market. Congratulations, you just found yours. :-)

Although it would be easy, and frankly more satisfying, to put the blame for the larger corporations putting the small stores out of business just on the corporations, but, in many cases there are others involved. One of the culprits is local government. In a neighboring city where there had been several small craft stores for years, a big franchise craft store wanted to come to town. So a deal was struck between them and the city government to give them a free ride on payroll taxes for 8 years. All but one of the small craft stores are now out of business as they were not given a free ride. The big crafts store is still around but did not bring the jobs apparently somebody had hoped they would. The crafts store is not an isolated incident. The city leaders who were responsible apparently don't mind a photo of a ribbon cutting saying "Look what I did", but after the fact they are not standing in front of empty store fronts and headlines about the massive budget deficit saying the same thing. Another factor in this is simply us as a consumer. We were attracted by lower prices and the promise of greater selection (yet to be fulfilled). When we turned back around, the stores at which we used to shop are gone. I am seriously oversimplifying a few factors of which there are many. Unfortunately with a lot of the competition gone in some communities it certainly does take away the choice to boycott by shopping somewhere else. The biggest enemy of the corporations, however, seems to be themselves. Wal-mart may be the largest retailer now, but they have apparently decided to rest on their laurels and let stuff like inventory, store maintenance, and especially customer service slip.--and from this point, I have completely lost track of anything I was saying-- ( :

I posted with the full knowledge that I would get an economics lecture. I accept that.

But my point is that free enterprise only works for the common good in the presence of abundant healthy competition. The quest for a virtual monopoly, to my thinking, interferes with the proper functioning of the system.

I'm also of the opinion that other factors, such as ethics, have been taken out of the mix. The positive goal of striving to be the best has largely been replaced by the desire to get rid of anyone better by any means available within (or not too far outside of) the law. Not that this wasn't always done, but it's become the accepted way of doing things.

I also see it as a step backward to create a climate in which only a corporation can afford to do something that an ordinary person used to be able to do, such as own a video store.

As for trusting the free market, I must confess that I trust it less and less as it becomes the sole consideration in most business decisions, particularly in the "arts." Thanks to the free market, we have scads of pointless remakes hitting theatres, radio stations across the continent playing the same bland middle-of-the road music non-stop, and loads of reality TV.

So yes, I feel even a free economy needs moderation or it reaches a point of diminishing returns for society.

Post Edited (12-31-04 04:05)

A few years after Hollywood Video opened in my town all the mom& pop stores closed up right along with Blockbuster (how odd is that) So now we have Hollywood and Movie Gallery (Not too bad of a place if you ask me)

Now a few words on monopolizing. I don't know how many of you are pro wrestling fans or not (Not that it really matters). At one time the WWF (F*&K YOU WORLD WILDLIFE FOUNDATION) had 2 companys that were compition, the WCW and ECW. Now over time ECW had major money trouble and filed chapter 11 bankruptsy. To help the owner of the company save face WWF bought the company and all rights. Then in the merger of AOL and Time/Warner the board of directors decided to sell WCW (Poor Ted wasn't even in on the deal). Guess who bought them and all rights? Now the WWE (Yuck) is the only company out there. So these guys are at the mercy of these ego maniacs. And if they don't likw it they can go back to making $50 to $100 a night. But again what did this do for WWE ratings? Well if you haven't been watching then you're not alone. My opinion is that companys like the WWE that buys out the compition are only puting the noose around their necks. All that's left is to kick the chair out.

Blockbuster sucks... I can't stand their poor selection. Cheaper prices aren't exactly going to get me to leave Netflix.

I agree with Menard... There is something way more sinister *cough* (government)at hand in the monopolizing of the video market.

I heard that the same thing happened to some of the dollar stores in my area. Alot of them were forced to close their doors after the Greenbacks chain came along.
Now I know that it wasn't the competition because the "Mom & Pop" shops still had a better selection.

*Ok, now I'm going off on a tangent* Ebay does the same thing to sellers. They look the other way when Power Sellers commit crimes or get numerous negative feedback but when a small fry does it they get canned immediately. What's wrong with that picture?

BURN EBAY and kill every employee that has anything to do with them. MU-HU-HU-HA!

I can appreciate exactly what you mean. A few years back, I waded into the fight against a Wal-Mart on the edge of the small community where I grew up. Unbelievable what you have to fight in a situation like that. Start with politicians who can only see property taxes and permit fees.

Add to that a really creepy, slimy developer (I do not exaggerate) who comes to town and assures everyone that the new centre will draw most of its customers from the city, and won't hurt anyone too badly. A consultant on his payroll provided a rosy report, explaining that the local market can easily bear another 250,000-odd square feet of retail space outside of any existing commercial area. An evironmental assessment declared that the forest on the property was not significant, nor was the loss of farmland. The township planners, responsible for ensuring that new development is harmonious, took the big stuff at face value and mostly wrangled over details. No concerns over whether it was an appropriate size, whether the location was right, or whether it would harm existing commercial areas.

Then there was the bribery. The developer, never seen before in our community, is suddenly sponsoring parade floats and such. Then the story got out that the company had also contributed to a few election campaigns as well.

The development was pushed through, but tied up in appeals for years. None were heard, because the various opponents eventually backed down, one by one. After some quiet negotiations, each walked away with a big payoff.

Now it just remains to be built, and we'll see who was right.

It has been a long time since I have watched wrestling. We used to get CWA wrestling here (Jerry Lawler, Bill Dundee, Austin Idol). A local broadcasting group also started their own wrestling program, ICW, which interestingly enough launched the wrestling career of a local boy, Macho Man Randy Savage. I used to enjoy wrestling when it was small studios and school gymnasiums. Now, rather than the promoters trying to get stations to carry them, wrestling for several years has been more like a glammed up TV show full of event advertising that wants TV stations to come to them. Apparently there is plenty of room in that shrinking line.

Sugar_Nads wrote:
> *Ok, now I'm going off on a tangent* Ebay does the same thing
> to sellers. They look the other way when Power Sellers commit
> crimes or get numerous negative feedback but when a small fry
> does it they get canned immediately. What's wrong with that
> picture?

Having run a little eBay business for a couple of years, I can vouch for that. There are a lot of really strict rules, mostly aimed at generating more listing fees for eBay, and they will pull your listings in a second if you even come close to breaking one. On the other hand, the big sellers break them all, and don't seem to be suffering any penalty. The little guys, meanwhile, can barely make a decent profit.

eBay has certainly become the prime example of the antithesis of customer service. Sellers want to be paid by paypal only (must be an incentive in that since paypal is part of eBay), want to be payed in 5 days or less (those who live in areas with a general postmaster route can empathize with it taking a week to mail a letter to your next door neighbor), and spell out all the things you will do as a buyer to assure the seller's satisfaction. There used to be a thing called customer service where stores would strive to assist their customers in any way they could. eBay's only loyalties, if you could call it that, are to the sellers who bring them money, and they offer little if any support for the buyer. Large companies like Wal-mart have developed an attitude of 'if we don't have it, you don't need it'. It seems more and more that rather than consumer demands determining the marketplace, the sellers are deciding what the consumer will buy.

Post Edited (12-30-04 10:44)

Strange that I read this now as earlier today, I learned that a large local, family-run store specializing in plants and which was basically a giant greenhouse attached to a large building, closed over the weekend. Around the holidays, they had a huge Christmas display with dozens of decorated trees on display (and for sale as well), in a darkened area with animatronic elves and such. If you needed any plants, flowers or anything for the garden (or anything for Christmas around the holidays), this store, Gloria's, would have it. The owner said that he could no longer compete with the chain stores like Wal-Mart, Lowe's and Home Depot. :(

I hadn't been there in several years, but when I was younger, every Christmas usually included at least one trip to Gloria's. I loved walking through the darkened section with all the trees on display, lit only by the various multi-colored lights. In later years, they also had "Chrissy, the talking Christmas Tree", which was basically a tree with a hidden camera and a speaker so that a hidden operator could talk to the kids. The article said that they're looking for some non-profit place to host it from now on.

One of the things I am fairly certain is putting a dent in the video stores business (and I meant that as a plural) is the lower cost to buy videos and DVDs. In the early eighties, the cost to rent a video in my area was around $4.00 for 1 day and the videos themselves would set you back anywhere from $39.99 to 99.99 (rough estimate). I remember buying a video on the Warner label for the budget price of $29.99. This time frame was ideal for those into horror, cult, and obscure movies. Even though there were some mainstream releases, a lot of what was available on video at that time were independent, import, and low-budget movies. I don't miss the prices, but I do miss a lot of those titles.

I agree that eBay doesn't do a whole lot for buyers, but it is the sellers who are eBay's real customers, and the sellers serve the buyers. That said, eBay is treating its sellers like crap, and the reason is that there is really no other game in town. I looked at alternative auction sites, and there are no good ones left. Not only does eBay want a cut of your sale price, which is fair, they've continued to jack up the listing fee, so they get well paid whether your item sells or not. This has had the effect of making it hard to make a decent profit on anything, and pointless to sell cheap items worth a few dollars. Between eBay fees and PayPal fees, we're giving up a couple of dollars on every ten-dollar dog collar we sell. That's a big bite for a company that doesn't essentially do anything but provide a few K of server space. For the buyer, this can also mean higher shipping fees, as sellers try to recover their costs. And to protect its cut, eBay has a lot of rules. You can no longer link to your outside web site, for example. To me, that is like a show telling vendors they can't have business cards on the table. If you want to offer a choice of colours on a product, eBay calls it a dutch auction, even if you're only selling one. They want you to list all the colours, and pay for that many. These are just a couple of the really loosely defined rules, which they enforce on a complaint basis. Essentially, your competitors are given the power to kill your listings. If eBay gets a complaint, they summarily axe the listing, ask no questions and grant no appeal. The only sellers who seem to be able to break the rules with impunity are the big ones, who are the biggest offenders, yet never seem to suffer any consequences.

Ebay does this because they've cornered the market, and sellers have nowhere else to go. If you want to play the game, you play by eBay's rules.

eBay will certainly find a way to, at the very least, annoy the heck out of you. Their reaction to a single complaint against a listing is seriously irksome. They had a real bad habit for a long time of trying to get a credit card number for just about anything you did; change your e-mail address, change account info, and a couple of years ago they tried to get your credit card number if you used the buy-it-now option. Although there are other online auctions they probably combined make up only a single digit percentage point. eBay is part of the growing disease...er scuse me, I meant to say conglomerate of AOL/eBay/Paypal/half.com/etc. in which each part of that conglomerate has miserably low customer service ratings and does not care. Then again, this is par for course for the internet in general. As sights are becomming more loaded with content and are becoming much larger downloads, eBay for example, those who cannot afford to constantly upgrade are being left behind; but then, that's the point, weed out the people who can't afford to be a customer. Overstock.com has started an auction site that is picking up bit by bit. Although they have some of the same problems as other online auctions, they are slowly making an attempt to prevent some of the problems eBay has just simply closed their eyes to. Overstock for one has barred the selling of wholesale lists and urls. I will not be impressed with them however until they bar sellers from only accepting Paypal as payment. The practice is unfriendly and elitist. Sorry about meandering. I sometimes reply to posts and then realize I had no train of thought throughout the post. Frankly, I think I just bored myself ( :

Haven't looked at overstock.com yet. I suspect if they ever become successful enough to compete, eBay will simply buy them out. Wouldn't be surprised if the owners are hoping for that. Just build it so far, then reap a huge payday just for getting out of the business. That is, of course, the other side of the coin. How many of the little guys really believe enough in what they're doing to hold out against corporate domination? Judging by how quickly the opponents were bought off in the local Wal-Mart debate, I'd say very few. I came out of that fight seriously disillusioned for a lot of reasons.

I think it comes down to a lack of values on all sides. Nobody considers the long-term effects of their actions on society.

Whatever mom and pop shops are left here (and there are a very scarce few) they are being kept alive soley by increasing the size of their porno rooms. In the city I live in, i do not know of any local video stores, they are all blockbuster.

Walmart single handedly managed to drive out those smaller shops across america. The small town america feel has been driven out by these corporate giants, walmart has to have a store within a one mile radius of another store - it's sickening. It's not like you're going to say well, it's just a walmart. I can throw a rock in any direction and hit a walmart, everyone in my city protests when walmart tries to open up yet another store, it becomes harder and harder to fight. I have 3 stores within one mile of me. Is that crazy?? They are parasites! Taking away the business from locals on every section of the city they can.

I don't mind the idea of walmart with large selection and cheap prices, i just don't like the reality of what it's done - what companies like this have done. Walmart pops into a small town, many people protest it but soon they give into it. But they sacrifice something much more historic, sentimental - the small town feel. And often they don't know it until it's gone.

Smaller shops, grocers, and companies fold, somehow walmart moves. And usually you notice that it's the small towns who are the ones putting up a fight, my mother is very nostalgic about what it was like before the walmart giants moved into small town America. Here's a good article

STORE WARS (http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/story.html)

Post Edited (12-31-04 11:03)

Wal-mart definitely used an interesting if not creative growth pattern. When I first became familiar with Wal-mart over twenty years ago, they were that interesting department store over in the other town. They targeted smaller communities the larger stores did not want. Although they presented this approach as being community friendly, it was essentially preying on the weak. As their tactics put small shops out of business and they grew, they moved to even larger communities and used an even more disgusting tactic of advertising the products they carried as 'Made in America' and the consumer would be supporting American workers by shopping there. When in reality Wal-mart has maintained cheap prices with cheap imports and forcing companies to take a cut on their prices or not be able to sell their products and subsequently putting more american workers out of jobs than any other company (this is opinion). Wal-mart has moved into the large cities and been there for a while. They have not created the stranglehold in many large cities that they would like because healthy competition still exists in the large cities where in the small communities it was primarily mom and pop businesses. Even though Wal-mart in some small communities probably bought out some of the competition to make them the only game in town, consumer greed (in my opinion) is at the heart of Wal-mart's success as the consumer flocked to Wal-mart to get cheap prices and left behind the shops that had been there for years. When they went back to those shops, they were not there. Of course other retailers started copying Wal-mart's strategy and placing their stores, such as video stores, in these communities. In our town, although overtaken by Wal-mart and Kroger, our video store which been here for years is still here and flourishing in a town where Blockbuster came and went. Of course the chain stores will just keep trying until they succeed because they know consumer loyalty is for sale and it is cheap.

I can remember the time, maybe 25 years ago, when there were more than half a dozen department store chains in my area, many private corner stores, several supermarket chains and independent grocers, drug stores, and specialty stores for just about everything. Each was distinctive. Now, there are basically two department store chains, two supermarkets (under various names), one drug store, and so on. Actually, the idea of department stores, supermarkets and drug stores has gone out the window, since everybody started trying to sell everything. One-stop shopping is no blessing when selection is cut back to free up display space, or when stores find their customers are being taken by someone they never thought of as a competitor, or when you have to walk past aisle after aisle of crap to find food in a grocery store. I've felt for some time that zoning regulations need to be revamped to narrow the permitted uses in a particular commercial zone. This is really getting out of control.

It got out of control before now. In addition to consumer loyalty being for sale, so is a city councilperson's vote.

The department stores, as indicated by their name, have used a successful strategy for years which reduces their overhead while allowing variety , selection and lower costs to them and the consumer. They use vendors which are outside companies which provides the inventory and a percentage of the sales for the floor space. Depending on the department store they could have less than 20% of the inventory that is actually theirs. There is nothing wrong with this business strategy as it has been used for years as a cost effective way to provide goods at a reasonable price. Where this has been taken advantage of is by companies like Wal-mart which have used the cost sharing not available, to a degree, to the smaller stores to put them out of business, and in Wal-mart's case, to either force an exclusivity agreement with these vendors or absorbing them; either way reducing the availability of cost sharing to others.

If that were not enough, over the years smaller vendors have been put out of business or absorbed by larger vendors as the retailers and vendors pushed for packaging and labelling requirements the smallers companies could not afford and stay competitive; such as the now standard UPC system which, although convenient, hurt many smaller companies that could not afford it and many retailers would not accept products without it. It has become large company supporting large company; not in healthy competition, but to prevent it.

Post Edited (12-31-04 13:39)

I've never sold anything on eBay, but I have bought several things. I've never used PayPal and I don't even have a PayPal account. A while back, eBay decided that it was in everyone's best interest to change any ID that included the user's email address to something randomly generated. Frankly, I think they did it solely to prevent anyone from contacting any other eBay user without going through their system. I guess they want to be able to snoop on "private" messages to make sure nobody is talking about anything they disapprove of. :-P

It is rather difficult to trust a service which has a policy of hiding any easy way to contact them. You literally have to jump through hoops to contact anything resembling customer service. If eBay made the decision to prevent users from using their e-mail address as a user name to prevent spamming would actually surprise me that they would do something that may benefit their customers. I used to get spam in the form of a phony eBay e-mail with a link requesting that you re-enter your user information and credit card for security purposes (scam). It is interesting that at the time, eBay was offering a software program to supposedly prevent this type of spam. I just wondered if eBay was providing the e-mail addresses.

I remember that scam. For all the work that went into making it look authentic, nobody bothered to proofread it, or at least run it through a spell checker.

No, I think eBay was out to protect their sellers, or at least their reputation, that time. They don't want word getting out that dealing through eBay carries any unusual risk. There are already enough of those kinds of rumours going around.

Just the same, they are doing everything they can to keep people from making any sort of business connections outside of eBay. And I agree, it is really hard to get ahold of anybody at eBay. About the only option is filling out a form (that is not always easy to find) for a specific type of question or complaint that does not always fit the situation. Then you hope somebody gets back to you with a satisfactory answer. I had mentioned their complaint-driven rules. Well, a few months ago, an unknown competitor was hitting our listings daily, reporting anything that remotely resembled an infraction. When we finally got our complaint through, and finally got a response, the answer was that people are basically honest, and nobody would do such a thing. If there were another option, I would stop dealing with eBay in a second.

I remember back in the 70's when the supermarket chain A&P got into trouble cutting milk prices below cost. I believe regulations on grocery items and what would be termed necessary commodities are still enforced. The biggest example of predatory pricing is the day after Thanksgiving. This is also the day you see consumers at their worst and frankly the season that will put a few more small businesses out of business. I also wonder what happened to that ego people used to have about not shopping at places like Kmart and Hill's because they felt it was beneath them. Wal-marts predatory practices, and other companies that have adopted them, have worked where Kmart and Hill's lower prices did not, except in certain larger cities. Howerver, when you have the only game in town for 80% of the population, does it make that much difference? I have faith that Wal-mart will be their own worst enemy. Unfortunately that still won't do much for the small business because the damage has already been done.

Even if word gets out that eBay carries any unusual risk, and it does, where are you going to go? In eBay's position of being the only real game in town, they don't care. Let's face it: the majority of people on eBay are not that computer savy. They know how to get online, check e-mail, find eBay (which for a lot of proprietary browsers is just a click away), find Amazon.com, and a few links that have been provided for them. They do not know how to use Google very effectively. When this is a good part of their customer base, do they really need to worry about them being able to find another auction site? Paypal is an unusual risk. They require your bank account number to use their service. A lot of people assume their bank will protect them. If Paypal, which is not a finacial institution, makes a mistake with your checking account, that is their mistake and your mistake; the bank has no obligation or requirement to correct that. Of course, new auction sites that pop up are a risk simply because they do not have the experience to deal with scam artists the way eBay does (although they still litter eBay). Amazon.com auctions, although not very big, does afford some protection in that all sellers in the US are required to use Amazon Payments, which means that you can use any credit card or payment type that Amazon accepts to pay a seller. This also, for credit card users, provides a degree of protection if their credit card offers such. If you use you checking account through Paypal, you are provided with neither protection. I try to only deal with sellers and online businesses that have flexibility in the types of payment they accept. The reason being that my local stores will provide customer service; I don't see any reason why online business should not held to the same standard. Aw dang, my soapbox just broke, guess I'll have to cut this short ( :

>I think a very big concern was also to keep email addresses from being
>harvested by automated crawlers compiling addresses for spammers.

That was one of the stated reason, but if that was true, they could have simply added an additional step to foil automated programs, like making you enter a letter/number sequence from an image, like many sites now do. Instead they eliminated the ability to get another member's email address and you have to send the message through eBay.

I don't think Blockbuster will ever be able to surpass Netflix....their selection will never measure up. Too many things they probably won't carry, whereas Netflix carries stuff like THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE and EMMANUELLE IN AMERICA which actually have hardcore sex scenes.

The marketplace still determines a lot...you still get great local video stores in major metropolitan areas or places where there's a good niche market. The places I've seen where the Hollywoods and Blockbusters have totallly taken over are areas where the customer base isn't overly interested in anything other than recent mainstream releases. At least in the case of Hollywood Video I think what they carry depends on the customer base--the Hollywood we went to when I used to live in Silicon Valley had much more diverse selection than the one I patronized back when I lived in the Midwest.

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Movies => Bad Movies => Topic started by: Susan on December 29, 2004, 11:07:11 AM