
Redbox Video Rental Machines Set to Disappear Across Michigan
Admit it, it's likely been awhile since you last rented a physical DVD from a Redbox location. The machines that became the successor to video rental locations like Blockbuster and Family Video and then the rental-by-mail original Netflix model appears ready to sunset just like those services.
The company behind Redbox announces that they are shuttering the business after an all but certain bankruptcy. That means Redbox locations that can be found around Michigan at gas stations like Speedway, pharmacies like Walgreens and grocers like Meijer will not just no longer be ubiquitous but disappear altogether.
Variety, the "showbusiness bible," reports that Redbox's parent company is cutting ties with 24,000 kiosks and is laying off 1000 employees. The bankruptcy isn't a reorganization rather a full liquidation.
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Who Owned Redbox and What Happened to It?
Here's something you likely missed during the pandemic, I sure did. Redbox was purchased by Chicken Soup of the Soul Entertainment - yes, the company behind the the series of sappy and schmaltzy (my opinion) self-help and motivational feel-good books - in 2020, perhaps taking a gamble on the rental of physical media during those cooped-up months. However,
Redbox’s business had been in decline for more than a decade before Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment bought it in 2020. Its revenue peaked in 2013 at $1.97 billion, and the chain at once time had operated more than 43,000 kiosks in the U.S. and Canada stocked with movies, TV shows and games.
As surprisingly as it may seem today - the Redbox once drew long lines of renters and returners.
You may yourself remember the 'Box asking you to 'stick around and see what else there is to rent' when you returned your items.
Now those will all be gone. The Redbox company once attempted to expand their kiosk business beyond media in a little-remembered automated convenience store experiment. In the early years of the 2000s, Redbox and McDonalds teamed up on the concept, seen below, and tested in locations around Washington, DC.
Redbox, will of course, not be the first nor the last company to fade into memory. Here are 50 well known ones you're sure to remember - or maybe not.
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Gallery Credit: Liz Barrett Foster