I worked at a Blockbuster for a few years right about when video was on the way out and DVD was on the way in. I don't think we screwed customers. A new releas

I worked at a Blockbuster for a few years right about when video was on the way out and DVD was on the way in. I don't think we screwed customers. A new release was $5 (AUS) for a night, that's hardly extortion. Almost all of our profit was made on new releases in their first week. The rest of the stock in the shop turned an almost insignificant profit and merely existed to buff the selection a bit and keep people in the store. Late fees were an annoying issue but a necessary evil when you only have X units of stock and if they aren't returned you can't rent them out again. We were pretty lenient on reducing late fees to sensible amounts but some people were terrible at bringing things back and incurred ridiculous fees. Physical rentals are a pain. On top of the X units issue, you have to keep them in good rentable condition and customers weren't very obliging on that front either. Digital delivery makes so much more sense now that we have the bandwidth to acommodate it. I can see a small market might still exist, but you can't afford to scale it anymore. Blockbuster was always going to die.