Dish Network's announcement that it is closing 300 Blockbuster stores surprised us. It wasn't that the stores would be closing...it was that the stores still existed.
In fact, after this round of closings, they will still have 500 stores around. According to, the above-linked Denver Post article, Dish "continues to see value in the Blockbuster brand, and we continue to analyze the store-level profitability as we have in the past," according to a spokesman.
Well, we wonder what kind of value they see and where that value is coming from. We're talking about a retailer that at its peak had more than 4,000 stores and now hardly has any visibility in shopping centers.
On a search of its store locations, we found one remaining unit in Manhattan. Chicago has three. We bet that mailboxes in both cities are filled daily with red envelopes.
But 500 stores is still a significant footprint. Can Dish make something work in these stores, like possibly selling broadband products, like execs have previously indicated? Or is there nothing that can be done with this concept?
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