Blockbuster Closing 300 Stores in US After Declining Sales
Blockbuster announced Monday that it will close around 300 of its stores in the U.S. over the next few weeks due to declining sales.
Blockbuster's parent company Dish Network Corp released the news, adding that around 3,000 employees will be laid off as a result of the closings.
"We continue to see value in the Blockbuster brand and we will continue to analyze store level profitability and - as we have in the past - close unprofitable stores," said spokesperson for Dish Network John Hall, according to The Los Angeles Times.
The business currently has about 850 total brick-and-mortar locations and the new number of closures number about 35 percent of the stores. The exact store locations have not yet been announced.
"There have been store closures" in the past, Hall also said to The Denver Post. "Really, from the time of acquisition there has been a strategy to evaluate stores on a case-by-case basis in an effort to look at their production."
Hall stated that the stores that will be closed in coming weeks are either underperforming or nearing the end of their leases.
Dish acquired Blockbuster in a 2011 bankruptcy sale and at that time the video store chain operated around 1,700 stores. News of closures come to no surprise as more consumers watch streaming videos or buy them on-demand through their cable company rather than trekking to the stores that were packed with customers in the 1990s.
Dish, which purchased the video chain for $320 million, is increasingly using Blockbuster's remaining physical locations to sell its Dish services such as video streaming to help it compete with Netflix and Redbox.
Since the acquisition by Dish, the Blockbuster brand has continued to decline in sales.
