Technology History | 211 NE Revere Avenue, Bend — The Franchise That Outlived the Chain

The number 211 is stencilled above the door, under a yellow-and-blue sign no other shop on earth still hangs. Ken and Debbie Tisher opened this place in 1992 as Pacific Video, the second store of a small Oregon chain, and Tisher told the local paper he wanted to run it as a mom-and-pop. They converted it to a Blockbuster franchise in 2000, the year Blockbuster's head office in Dallas turned down the chance to buy Netflix. Being a franchise is why it survived the chain. When Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 on 23 September 2010, and when DISH Network bought the assets the following April for about $228 million in cash, the stores that fell were the corporate ones. DISH closed the last of those by early 2014, leaving roughly fifty franchised stores, and those kept closing too. Two in Alaska went in July 2018, which left Bend the last in the United States. A store in a Perth suburb stopped renting in March 2019, which left Bend the last anywhere trading under the name, independently owned and licensing the trademark from DISH a year at a time. Inside are about 1,200 titles, roughly 4,000 members and a point-of-sale system still running on DOS. Sandi Harding has managed the shop since 2004, and says it has filled sixteen guest books since the closures turned it into a destination. Visitors buy the shirts and magnets, which are printed by businesses in Bend under that same licence, and the rental counter goes on renting to the town. The photograph dates from August 2018, a few weeks after Alaska closed, when this was the last Blockbuster in the country but not yet the last in the world. Photo: Coasterlover1994, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons