I wanted to tell the story, I just didn’t know when and how. They were great help in helping me figure out how to do this, and that’s how it happened. Of course, since I’m not an author, I didn’t know how to go about it, and that’s where the Scribe people came in.
When we closed the last store and the fog cleared, and I really started thinking about it and visiting with friends and family about what the concepts could be and how the story should be told, it kind of started coming together. I was wrapped up in the business, I knew I wanted to tell the story, but until you take time to step back and really think about it, I didn’t really know how I was going to tell it or even if I was going to tell it. I knew the end was near and I started thinking about it then.Ī lot of it is just based on the time that I have. I started thinking about it, I guess, probably around 2017. I closed my last store in August of 2018, which was almost five years after Blockbuster had filed for bankruptcy.ĭrew Appelbaum: Now, this was a while ago, why is now the time to share these stories in the book? Did you have an “aha moment,” did you have something inspiring that happened to you lately, or something as simple as you have a lot of time in your hands because of COVID?Īlan Payne: A lot of it was timing because I was busy running the business until 2018, and then even after that, it was some time to wrap things up. They decided to sell the video rental business they were in and I left in 1993 to join a Blockbuster franchisee and was there for 25 years, which I think is the longest anybody was with Blockbuster. I spent the first seven years of that with a grocery company called H-E-B that was very heavily into it back in the 80s and 90s when the business was starting. Can you give us a rundown of your professional background?Īlan Payne: I spent 31 years in the video rental business, which is longer than just about anybody. Alan, thank you for joining, welcome to The Author Hour Podcast.ĭrew Appelbaum: Let’s kick this off. The book is a cautionary tale for today’s disruptive marketplace and explains why Blockbuster was a broken company long before Netflix ever streamed a single movie.ĭrew Appelbaum: Hey Listeners, my name is Drew Applebaum and I’m excited to be here today with Alan Payne, author of Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster’s Inevitable Bust. Beneath the surface of explosive growth, lay a shaky foundation of financial difficulty, tunnel vision, and missed opportunities. How does an iconic brand like this die?Īlan Payne’s new book Built to Fail, tells a complete inside story of Blockbuster’s meteoric rise and catastrophic fall.
Millions of customers visited more than 8,000 stores around the globe every week, providing more data about movie audiences than anyone in history had ever owned. For more than two decades, Blockbuster Video was America’s favorite way to watch movies.
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