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Blockbuster Case

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Stage One: Growth

The video rental market began in December of 1977 when George Atkinson first opened his first video rental store which was later named “The Video Station”. Within five years the first external factor affecting video rental stores was the movie studios. Movie studios were immediately in defense mode when they saw the rise in video rentals. They wanted to assure their own survival by restricting video rental stores through government regulations. The video stores protested and shut down their stores for hours to bring to light the limitations this made for the public to rent videos. The bill was later defeated. Atkinson grew to 42 stores in 20 months and in 7 years had a total of 500 stores. And so began the rise of the video rental market.
David P. Cook seeing the opportunities in the video rental industry opened Blockbuster in 1985. Although two years later David sold his stake in the company, Blockbuster continued to grow and became the number one video retailer by 1988. Blockbuster understood video rentals were an impulse buy. For this reason Blockbuster rapidly expanded the firm’s size by strategically placing stores in close proximity to the customers. Acquisition of the third largest video retailer was another way Blockbuster continued to grow. By 1991, fifteen hundred Blockbuster stores existed domestic and internationally. To improve its market position, Blockbuster sold new release videos at $2.99 for a two-day rental. This was the same price for older movies which could be rented for five days. This strategic pricing structure made it easy for customers to come to Blockbuster for their rentals. It was convenient to know the pricing was the same at every store and more time could be spent picking out which movie you wanted to watch versus what kind of movie because both new releases and older movies were priced the same.

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