Risktory: The Story Of Risk

Coming up this week, whatever happened to Blockbuster, the video giant. From being on every street corner, and from being an intrinsic part of pop culture life (who didn’t, in retrospect of course, love the panic of having to rewind the video tape before returning it to avoid a fee, so that your parents didn’t yell at you)… Blockbuster’s death seemed rapid, unceremonious, and kinda sad.Now, if you ask most people what happened to Blockbuster in the mid 2000s, the instantaneous answer is…. Netflix. Netflix killed Blockbuster.Ehhh, not quite. While there’s no question that Netflix (and other on-demand video services, like RedBox) were a contributing factor, and perhaps even the coup ge grace, the seeds of Blockbuster’s destruction had been sewn far, far earlier. What happened in the mid 2000s to Blockbuster was a perfect storm of variables - some within the giant’s control vs others that flew out of nowhere – which came home to roost. Variables that, when realized concurrently, made decline all but inevitab