Route 59 Blockbuster Store to Close in September

One of Plainfield's two Blockbuster stores will close sometime in September, its manager said Monday.

A sale of all merchandise is under way at the 13400 Route 59 store, with pre-watched movies being sold for $5.99 and used videogames being discounted by 30 percent, said the manager, who would not give her name.

Employees were told in July that the store would be closing, but liquidation of stock did not start until recently.

A second Plainfield Blockbuster at 4704 Caton Farm Road is not closing, its manager said.

The news is not necessarily unexpected as Blockbuster Inc., based in Dallas, announced last year it would be closing anywhere from 500 to 960 of its 9,600 stores in the U.S. and 17 countries, and late last week it was reported that the company may file a pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy in mid-September.

The Caton Farm store manager, who also declined to give his name, said he did not know whether any of the Route 59 store employees would be shifted to his store or others.

"It's unknown at this time," he said. "We don't get that kind of information until closer to the time that the store is closing."

No exact closing date has been set yet, the Route 59 store manager said. She said it would be sometime in September but she did not know whether it would be tied to the amount of merchandise liquidated.

Hollywood Video, Blockbuster's largest competitor, announced in April that it would be closing all of its 4,700 stores, including those under the names Movie Gallery and Game Crazy. The last store closed this month, according to published reports.

Blockbuster has been systematically shutting down stores, eliminating 983 between 2007 and 2009, and as of the beginning of this year had just 3,525 U.S. outlets remaining, according to CoStar Realty Information. The retailer has been trying to make inroads in the kiosk DVD business by erecting Blockbuster Express kiosks to compete with RedBox, which had 19,000 kiosks at the beginning of this year, CoStar reported.

The first Blockbuster store opened in 1985 in Dallas, and the company quickly went national when purchased by the owner of Waste Management. It experienced its greatest success in the late 1980s, but then the market began to slow in the 1990s. In 1994 the company entered into a controversial merger with Viacom, which was also losing market shares, according to the Web site www.referenceforbusiness.com.

The company's been struggling financially since 1997, the Web site said, and in 2005 did not pay a quarterly dividend for the first time since 1999. Its loss for the first half of this year was $136.4 million, the Wall Street Journal reported, and the company missed a $42 million payment to bondholders that was postponed until Sept. 30.