Block Busted-Blockbuster Video To Close Whopping 920 Stores

Oh WOW.  Nine hundred and twenty Blockbuster Video locations are going to get the axe by the end of 2010, but I haven’t even told you the WEIRD part yet.  Despite the fact that almost a cool thousand stores are going to collapse like the Berlin Wall by the time the ball drops on 2011, that’s only twenty percent of Blockbuster’s stores.

That means Blockbuster had somewhere in the neighborhood of forty six hundred stores located nationwide.  Assuming a uniform distribution, that means there were, on average, eighty four Blockbuster stores PER STATE in the United States.  Each state, on average, is going to lose roughly eighteen stores.

On the one hand, this could be a calculated move designed to kill the video store business and instead focus more resources on the mail order video market, which they’re already doing with their own Blockbuster service.

Conversely, this COULD just be a move to kill some overage.  Eighty four stores per state?  Do you really need more than one, maybe two, per city?  Maybe you have to go across town to rent a video–I’ve got about a ten mile one way trip to MY nearest video store.  Excuse me if I don’t cry for you, Argentina.

But either way, this is going to mean a lot more job loss in an already bad market.