Can't say I'll be sad to see them go. While the job itself wasn't the worst I've ever had, pretty much everyone I dealt with at a management level was a total scumbag, and they - like many retail jobs - paid like absolute shit. I spent 2 1/2 years at that place and only made $9.00 or so an hour, despite being an assistant manager for most of that time.
If there's any silver lining, it's that during the time I worked there, DVD was slowly trickling into the public eye, and we still had a ton of VHS stock, which meant a lot of foreign and niche stuff hanging around the store, and we got 5 free rentals a week. I suppose most of that old stuff wound up in the trash, which is what they did with overstock after a certain point (literally, tossed right in the dumpster outside), but my employee discount helped me get some nice price cuts on special orders.
I loved my job at Blockbuster when I worked there. From the DVD comment, I'd say we worked there around the same time. I was in high school. That could be the difference maker right there. For me it was just a job for spending money. I was still living with my parents since I was still in high school, so I had no bills to pay. I didn't NEED the job.
But I thought it was a fun place to work. You get paid to talk to people about movies all day. And you got free rentals. Plus we got to watch movies in the stores when the fun manager was working. Sometimes the rush on Friday nights would get crazy, but when that happened you just took it 1 customer at a time. And of course the irate and beligerant "I refuse to pay late fees" customer was always a pain. But most of the time I'd just scan a free rental coupon for them to shut them up. I certainly have had to kiss more ass and work harder at my real adult job than I ever did at Blockbuster.
Nah, it was mostly a spending money type job for me, too. I think I was maybe 18 or 19 at the time, maybe 20 by the time I quit, since I was there for about 2 1/2 years.
It had its upsides, no question. I liked a few of my coworkers, and we usually worked until close, so the last few hours of the night were pretty much just spent kicking around, then we'd all pile outta there late and go get coffee somewhere, and the free rentals helped me churn through a massive amount of movies during my time there. Inventory nights consisted of blasting music, plowing through the endless sea of movies with scanners, and hoping we'd all get out of there before sunrise.
We had a particularly high volume store (highest in our district, anyway) in the 'burbs though, and most of the customer base consisted of extremely rude people with awful, cringe-inducing taste in movies. Early on, I held onto some hope that we'd eventually get people to pick up stuff like Evil Dead 2 or Videodrome, or who would rent some cool game or other, but almost without exception, that stuff was rented out by employees. Most customers stuck only to the 'hit' movies on the new release shelf, Pokemon crap for their demon spawn, and rarely veered away from either. Friday and Saturday nights were filled to the brim with people complaining that we didn't have enough copies of whatever big movie was out at the time, even if we had two or three of those tall shelves filled up. If some movie had gotten popular that had subtitles, like Life is Beautiful, we'd listen to a barrage of these idiots complaining about reading.
It's the job that, for me, really brought home that line from Clerks: This job would be great if it weren't for the fucking customers, so we mostly just did our best to ignore them :p
