The Myth of Scarcity

The company that made you wait, then charged you for waiting, is being lovingly rebuilt out of old newspaper boxes — this time with nothing to sell.

Blockbuster's actual business model, at its peak, ran on making you show up in person and hope the copy you wanted wasn't already checked out. The New Release wall was deliberately understocked — a full shelf doesn't create urgency. The other half was the fee for bringing the tape back late: nearly $800 million a year company-wide in 2000, about 16% of total revenue. By the time Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, $930 million in debt, that same line item had collapsed to $134 million. Netflix had spent a decade proving people would rather pay one flat fee than get punished for a Tuesday they forgot about.

Brian Morrison worked at a Blockbuster. In 2019, watching piles of ex-rental VHS tapes get thrown out across LA, he built a wooden box, painted it the exact blue and yellow, stocked it with donated movies, and put a sign on it: take one, leave one, free. FreeBlockbuster.org now lists over 200 of these, hand-built by strangers, in nearly every US state plus Canada, Mexico, and the UK. The project's own mission statement, verbatim: to "combat the myth of scarcity by providing free entertainment to as many people as possible." Scarcity being the exact mechanism the original company ran on.

Two of the newest boxes went up this month in Everett and Edmonds, Washington — per the Herald, Erika and Alan Stetson's on Hoyt Avenue, and Nicole Caulfield's, built in July and stocked partly from her own teenage years working an actual video store. "Physical media is making a comeback," Stetson said. "If everything goes down, you still physically own your DVDs."

Every box ships with a laminated rules card, and the rules are all movie quotes. "Keep the change, ya filthy animal." — Home Alone (1990). Movies are free to borrow. "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." — The Godfather (1972). We gladly accept donations.