24
votes
Redbox owner (Chicken Soup For The Soul) to liquidate in Chapter 7 bankruptcy shift; workforce of 1,000 to be let go and 24,000 kiosks shut down, lawyer says
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Dade Hayes
- Published
- Jul 10 2024
- Word count
- 580 words
Three big takeaways from this article.
I am shocked that a book series that I recall being quite religious spun off to own a video rental company that seemed to offer all mainstream movies.
There is a special place in Hell for people that take employees' healthcare premiums and pocket it and cause the employees to lose coverage unknowingly. I had a friend that this happened to a year ago and only found out when he showed up for a chemo appointment.
It is sad that people are losing the last(?) video rental service for places with poor internet service. I regularly travel to parts of the US that couldn't stream video to save their lives and I suspect the Redbox in those towns were some of the few profitable ones.
Also owns streaming service Crackle and, what I find most baffling, bought Redbox in 2022, after its revenues had dropped by 20%, 36%, and 50% respectively in the three years prior.
Wait, is Chicken Soup for the Soul a private equity firm now? I had no idea there was a company by that name, or what its high-profile holdings were. What does any of that have to do with the saccharine books that were briefly popular 20 years ago? Bizarre.
On the flip side, maybe the death of Redbox will give the others a fighting chance.
What others? Family Video was the last major chain, and they closed their stores in 2021. As far as I can see, the remaining video stores are niche specialty stores in urban areas (e.g., Scarecrow Video in Seattle), not in rural areas with bad internet.
I went out to the remote(-ish) oil fields in Drayton Valley, Alberta, for a work trip, and one of the hotels/motels we stayed in had a whole bunch of shelves of DVDs for the oil workers there. The number of places in North America that have poor enough internet service that you can't stream has to be declining, the remaining places are probably small enough that most stores and services are operated locally instead of by a chain. You don't necessarily need a chain to service a local need.
I can't pretend to know what's available in all the rural corners of the US where internet is still abysmal, but I was thinking small niche stores, yes.
But it does present itself as an opportunity for a smaller player. Admittedly an opportunity probably better/easier served by a quality library.
I have very fond memories of getting movies at the supermarket I went to around 2007-2011. In the beginning I also had Netflix sent me DVDs through the mail. Redbox was awesome because I could get a movie instantly, when I knew I wanted to watch something that night. It was super convenient and cheap.
Towards 2011 I don’t think I used it that much anymore since Netflix was also doing streaming. I think Redbox was still offering some newer titles than Netflix did, but it was no longer in my system to pick up physical media ánd return it.
My family started renting movies from Redbox starting around 2011. From 2011-2015 we would rent five movies (they were still roughly a dollar a movie) every weekend. We’d get pizza and make a thing out of it. That really was a good initial push in the amount of movies I watched. I saw most releases from 2014 because of this little ritual we had.
Good times, good times 😊
Someone should scoop up all the kiosks and turn them into something similar to those Little Free Library things you sometimes see on the street. Start some sort of nonprofit or something around movie sharing. Might have to figure out how to deter thievery, but then again, maybe that wouldn't be much of a problem with DVDs not worth much of anything nowadays.
im sorry....whomst owns (well, owned, i guess) redbox??
gross, but somehow unsurprising that they kept taking out the healthcare fees but not actually paying the healthcare company so that employees could like. Use the thing they're paying for.
Also, those books were hot trash full of toxic positivity garbage. So im extra unsurprised thst the parent company is Being Like This. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯