Video Rental

Blockbuster opened its first video-rental store in Dallas in 1985 and rode the VHS and DVD boom to roughly 9,000 stores worldwide at its mid-2000s peak. Friday-night trips to browse the new-release wall — and the dreaded late fee — were a fixture of American life. The chain famously passed on a chance to buy Netflix, and as streaming and mail-order DVDs took over, Blockbuster collapsed into bankruptcy. Corporate stores closed in 2014, leaving a lone franchise in Bend, Oregon as 'the last Blockbuster.'

Family Video outlasted nearly every competitor by owning its real estate rather than leasing, keeping costs low and renting on properties it controlled. Concentrated in the Midwest and South, it stayed family-owned, leaned on free-rental promotions, and even added pizza shops and fitness centers to its buildings. The pandemic finally did what streaming had been doing for years, and Family Video closed its last stores in 2021 — the end of the American video-store era.

Hollywood Video grew quickly in the 1990s into Blockbuster's biggest national rival, with large, brightly lit stores, a deep catalog, and the no-late-fee 'MVP' membership push. It launched the Game Crazy video-game shops inside many locations. Acquired by Movie Gallery in 2005, Hollywood Video was dragged down as DVD-by-mail and streaming gutted rental demand, and it liquidated alongside its parent in 2010.

Movie Gallery built the second-largest video-rental chain in North America by concentrating on small towns and rural markets that the bigger players ignored. Its 2005 purchase of Hollywood Video doubled its size overnight but loaded it with debt just as the rental business began to crater. After two bankruptcies in three years, Movie Gallery liquidated all of its stores — including the Hollywood Video banner — in 2010.