Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster’s Inevitable Bust by Alan Payne talks about one of the biggest corporate collapse in American history. After having read the book, I honestly don’t think the author could have come up with a better title for the book. While Enron was caught doing financial magic tricks to impress Wall Street and shareholders, they were also exposed as a highly toxic working environment with very poor management. Blockbuster will be shown to be guilty of the latter. Guilty in the most incomprehensible way ever. This book was written by not someone from the outside looking in, but rather someone on the inside. Someone who has actually spent a decade and more on actually running Blockbuster stores as a franchisee and witnessed firsthand at how bad and disillusioned management really got every step of the way. Warning: Built to Fail will cause your blood pressure to rise. It will cause you at times to laugh uncontrollably at how ridiculous it all got. Most of all, it will cause you to just stare in disbelief at how many chances Blockbuster got at altering its future for the better, but yet fumbled it all away. Ladies and gentlemen, similar to a natural disaster, Blockbuster’s downfall is something you can’t keep your eyes away from once you start looking.

There’s always two sides to a story, but even if half of what the author is claiming in the book is true, it’s still absolutely astonishing. For many like myself, I had no clue on how Blockbuster itself was actually formed from the beginning. Worse, people like myself had no clue on how Blockbuster was actually run, not only as a corporate business but from the franchisee’s point of view as well. This book changed all that. It goes over how literally, from the very beginning, the company was built to fail. All the original owner wanted to do was grow, grow and grow. They did this by simply opening up as many stores as possible. However, they paid hardly any attention to how they were actually run. They got away with this model for a few years, mainly due to how immature the video rental business was in the mid 80s. Blockbuster literally won because they were able to open hundreds to thousands of stores and eventually forced everyone else to close down. However, once this was achieved, they literally sat on their laurels and arrogantly paid no attention to competitors. They had one goal and one goal only: to open even more stores.

As the author stated, when people are normally asked of what they believe drove Blockbuster to deathbed and most of the time the answer given would be due to Netflix streaming. However, Alan goes to prove that Blockbuster was doomed way before Netflix even got started nor years before they started streaming movies over the Internet. They literally had no business model other than to build more stores. With incompetent CEO’s and upper management over the years taking over, the problem exacerbated until the company was in a death spiral. The author also goes to show that Blockbuster had many chances to alter its course in history. It was interesting to learn that Netflix had actually both offered to sell itself to Blockbuster during the early 2000s along with actually offering them a lifeline years later by buying them out as well once the situation was reversed. This along with a ton of other useful information on how Blockbuster slowly imploded will shock you to the core. Blockbuster’s demise did leave a lasting imprint though for the entire corporate world: how not to run a company for the long term.

Built to Fail was so hard to put down once I got started. As someone who enjoyed Blockbuster in those days, it’s sad yet very insightful to learn just why things happened the way they did. Like, why exactly were the new releases nowhere to be found in my store? Why did I start seeing all kinds of weird items like dolls and trinkets one would usually find for sale in tourists shops appearing all over a video rental store? Why exactly did I see employees with a clipboard on Saturday night manually counting the shelf inventory of movies? Why did renting older movies cost the same or more as new releases? While we all know Blockbuster failed, the reasons for why it did may not be the reasons you may be thinking of, and it’s all told here in Built to Fail. It would be fun to see maybe a two or three episode mini television series on this whole saga, and it would be a most bittersweet ending if it got produced as a Netflix Original.