The World's Last Blockbuster Is Still Open Amid Pandemic

In a radically transformed world where businesses large and small are struggling to stay afloat amid a global crisis, the last remaining Blockbuster store, which by most accounts should have shuttered years if not decades ago, is still open for business. You can’t go to the gym, eat at a restaurant or peruse the racks at your favorite store, but the world’s last Blockbuster will be damned if you can’t rent a DVD.

The Bend, Oregon location, which officially became the last one in existence in 2018 after fellow hangers-on in Alaska and Australia finally bit the dust, has managed to survive the collapse of physical media as well as competition from streaming competitors like Netflix and Hulu. Now, the legendary store is bracing itself to battle a pandemic that has already knocked many a more relevant business to its knees.

“We’re still making plans and pushing forward and we’re the last one for a reason,” general manager Sandi Harding told Vice. “We don’t go down without a fight. So we’re going to keep fighting for a while.”

While the store has weathered two temporary closures since the lockdowns began, it has reopened each time, emerging with new strategies to keep video rentals in the hands of its loyal, socially distant customers.

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Curbside pickup has officially begun and we can’t thank you all enough for your support! We’ve been crazy busy with all the online orders made recently and that’s been a tremendous help bringing income into the store assuring us that we can stay open during these tough times! Thank you to @daivya4infinity for painting on our window, support your local artist as much as possible if you need anything painted hit him up!

A post shared by The Official Last Blockbuster (@blockbusterbend) on Mar 31, 2020 at 1:11pm PDT

After first instituting a first-in-Blockbuster-history curbside-pickup system, the store now allows ten customers in at a time. And while it may seem surprising that Blockbuster might ever be in danger of attracting more than ten customers at a time to begin with, it seems old-school video rental has seen a lockdown-era resurgence among Netflix-weary quarantiners.

“I had a customer come in and she said, ‘I am so grateful that you reopened, because I couldn’t flip through Netflix one more time,’” Harding told Vice.

In these dark times, the world’s last Blockbuster has emerged as an unlikely pandemic hero: a beacon of hope, an icon of survival. If Blockbuster can persist throughout the last two decades of near-total obsolescence, surely we can survive this.

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