The Death of Compromise

Josh Gammon:

The industries built to help facilitate third spaces in our communities keep getting bought out and shut down. When I think about my stint at Blockbuster during college, I like to joke that I was one of the last employees. It’s not not true. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and I was working at one of Tulsa’s last remaining stores until it closed sometime in 2011.

Josh and I have been friends since high school and I remember occasionally going to visit him at his Blockbuster before it closed. Even before they announced its closing, the store felt like a relative everyone expected to die soon but wasn’t comfortable discussing. His store finally closed in April 2011 on the same day as half of the 21 stores in the Tulsa metro area, including the one in Broken Arrow I always went to as a kid. I was sad, but I hadn’t rented anything from a Blockbuster it probably 4 or 5 years.

It’s easy to look back and say Blockbuster should have innovated, and in my MBA program that’s exactly what my textbooks and professors said. They thought Blockbuster should have merged with someone bigger. Or they should get rid of late fees, or offer DVDs by mail, or do monthly subscriptions, or kiosks, or streaming. But Blockbuster actually did every single one of these. The reality is that they did these badly and too-late. Blockbuster did not die of a failure of imagination or even a failure to implement new ideas. Blockbuster died because consumer tastes were changing faster than they could.

The closest thing to a Blockbuster near me now is my local library. There is a lot of talk about libraries being “in” again, but every time I go to mine it is as much of a ghost town as Josh’s Blockbuster was. I love the library, and I am glad other people love it too. But the most common reason I physically walk into one is to pick up a hold or drop one off. If I linger to browse around, I am almost always the only person in the building doing so.

That is far opposite the way I remember the library in the ’90s and early 2000’s. People wandered the stacks and hogged the computers. The stereotypical librarian shushing a loud room now feels like a badly outdated cultural reference because it assumes enough people were in the library to have caused a ruckus in the first place.

Here’s my hypothesis: compromise is dead, and it killed in-person browsing with it.

Prior to everything being online, or conveniently delivered in 2 days or less, you had to physically go to where something was to obtain it. It was a crazy concept, I know. You could call ahead to ask about something’s availability, but that was a crapshoot and required you look up their phone number in the phonebook. When I worked at Best Buy in college, I spent plenty of shifts on phone duty answering strangers about whether we had a movie in stock. But most people did not call. They just showed up, saw what was on the shelf and made their selections from what was there. Now, you can search their stock without getting off the couch, and if you can’t order it to your door, you might be able to order it for pickup from a variety of locations so you only need make a trip when it’s guaranteed to be there for you. No matter the scenario, you never have to settle. You can now always get exactly what you want.

Being denied the movie you wanted to rent, when you wanted to rent it, and then compromising on an alternative was a normal and necessary part of a Friday night¹. I didn’t realize it was one of the things I might even miss most about that time until Josh wrote about walking the shelves to talk to customers. Blockbuster expected employees to burn their ten free weekly rentals on new releases so they could walk the aisles and give recommendations when the title someone was looking for wasn’t available. But in a world without a need to compromise, nobody needs recommendations.

While a lot of things were at play when Blockbuster died, the one that wasn’t immediately obvious to everyone was that we were in the middle of a major format change. Not from DVD to Blu-Ray, but from disc to digital. Blockbuster made money on all sides of the VHS to DVD transition, clearing out tape inventory to holdouts while selling everyone else the DVDs and the player to go with them. But TV on DVD started to break the video store concept. One season of a show might be a dozen discs and nobody wants to be left on a cliffhanger. Buying and collecting sets also became its own thing. But the success of DVD as a format and box-sets in general caused studios to overproduce, and eventually discs got too cheap not to own. I saw movies and TV box sets for outrageously low prices when I worked Black Friday at Best Buy. Studios did this assuming everyone would just buy it all again on Blu-ray, or digital if it came to that. They didn’t, and it was because they wouldn’t have to.

On September 23, 2010, Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11. Around the same time, Home Media Magazine reported 17% of American households had a Blu-ray player (a misleading number propped up by the PS3) while more than 95% with a DVD player. But the same report said Netflix wasn’t far behind in 15% of homes, and two months later, Netflix upgraded their experimental streaming service for DVD subscribers to its own plan. The Blu-ray format didn’t stand a chance against Netflix, and neither did Blockbuster. Blockbuster’s own discs by mail service barely put a dent in an already leaking bucket, but there’s no reason to keep stores open if the only profitable business is via the mail or the Internet.

So why hasn’t the rise of e-books and digital audiobooks caused a massive downfall for my library? Often when I hear someone talk about their library, it’s a discussion about how they’re 85th in line to get an e-book or an audiobook from Libby. A library’s collection is a living thing. Shelf space is finite, so books that don’t circulate have to be pruned in order to make room for books that do. This churn is necessary but mostly invisible. But a library is not a for-profit storefront, so taxpayer-funded libraries can exist as long as communities decide they should. Setting aside the completely unfair and bullshit nature of digital book licenses for libraries, people are still relying on their local libraries because they could make digital materials a part of their offerings in a way that Blockbuster could never. Your tax dollars support your library’s ability to acquire materials, even digital ones, and it’s great that they can offer it to you in a format that is convenient for you. Instead of replacing churned books exclusively with physical ones, they’ve been diverting more and more to digital. But with fewer physical books to store, it’s also caused the idea of what a library is for to shift. Some systems have started adding things like tool and equipment lending, community tele-health portals and maker-spaces. Adding and supporting those things means less money for books, and you could read that as a loss but I think it’s a clever answer. Physical library spaces continue to be valuable because they’re making the spaces more about what is most valuable in person instead exclusively a warehouse of books. A library continues to exist because it can compromise.

The other part of all of this is that video stores and libraries you physically visited were less obvious “third spaces” than coffee shops and shopping malls. The internet is a third space now, but because it’s digital it offers me more ways to control who can interact with me while also affording me too much ability to exclude unfamiliar things I might actually like.

For both good and bad, physical third spaces are affected by the community who inhabit them. I can’t choose the people who live and work in my community, but their diversity increases what we collectively get to experience. There’s more guarantee in the familiar, whether that be people or media, but that also has a flattening effect where the lowest of lows are effectively gone, but the highs aren’t as high either.

Some of the best compromises I ever made happened at libraries and movie stores. I watched movies and read books I’d never heard of, and a few of them became the most important things I’ve ever seen or read. Some were absolute crap, and not even the good kind of crap. But the risk was part of it. There was less information to make decisions with, so you may have just found your next favorite movie but you won’t find out until you get home to watch it.

When you start looking around, you’ll can see that the death of compromise is all around us, but it doesn’t have to be. Ask for recommendations, take more risks and you’ll see that compromise is actually how to get to a better place than where you even wanted to go.