Uh oh…when they start throwing white collars off the boat, you can tell it’s sinking, and pretty fast, too.

Sure, Blockbuster proper is playing it very cool, saying that the layoffs represented only “a small fraction” of the three thousand plus total employees in the Dallas-Fort Worth company headquarters, but still–any layoff in “executive ranks” is a pretty big step.

See, normally, in a big company like that the executives are well-connected, and thus likely to be able to convince the people doing the firing that there are whole bunch of peons directly BELOW them who should take it in the throat as opposed to them.

But this time, apparently, there were either insufficient connections to do the job, or there simply weren’t enough peons to spare.

And if things are getting so bad at Blockbuster that they simply can’t cut peons any more, you KNOW things are on the verge of going belly up.