In the nineteen-eighties, a new kind of chain store came to dominate American shopping: the “category killer.” These stores killed off all competition in a category by stocking a near-endless variety of products at prices that small retailers couldn’t match. Across America, independent stores went out of business, and the suburban landscape became freckled with Toys R Us, CompUSA, and Home Depot superstores. But the category killers’ reign turned out to be more fragile than expected. In the past decade, CompUSA and Circuit City have disappeared. Toys R Us has struggled to stay afloat, and Barnes & Noble is in the midst of a boardroom battle prompted by financial woes. And, last month, Blockbuster finally admitted the inevitable and declared Chapter 11.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

The obvious reason for all this is the Internet; Blockbuster’s demise, for one, was inextricably linked to the success of Netflix. But this raises a deeper question: why didn’t the category killers colonize the Web the way they colonized suburbia? That was what pundits expected. Companies like Blockbuster, the argument went, had customer expertise, sophisticated inventory management, and strong brands. And, unlike the new Internet companies, they’d be able to offer customers both e-commerce and physical stores—“clicks and mortar.” It seemed like the perfect combination.

The problem—in Blockbuster’s case, at least—was that the very features that people thought were strengths turned out to be weaknesses. Blockbuster’s huge investment, both literally and psychologically, in traditional stores made it slow to recognize the Web’s importance: in 2002, it was still calling the Net a “niche” market. And it wasn’t just the Net. Blockbuster was late on everything—online rentals, Redbox-style kiosks, streaming video. There was a time when customers had few alternatives, so they tolerated the chain’s limited stock, exorbitant late fees (Blockbuster collected about half a billion dollars a year in late fees), and absence of good advice about what to watch. But, once Netflix came along, it became clear that you could have tremendous variety, keep movies as long as you liked, and, thanks to the Netflix recommendation engine, actually get some serviceable advice. (Places like Netflix and Amazon have demonstrated the great irony that computer algorithms can provide a more personalized and engaging customer experience than many physical stores.) Then Redbox delivered the coup de grâce, offering new Hollywood releases for just a dollar.

Why didn’t Blockbuster evolve more quickly? In part, it was because of what you could call the “internal constituency” problem: the company was full of people who had been there when bricks-and-mortar stores were hugely profitable, and who couldn’t believe that those days were gone for good. Blockbuster treated its thousands of stores as if they were a protective moat, when in fact they were the business equivalent of the Maginot Line. The familiar sunk-cost fallacy made things worse. Myriad studies have shown that, once decision-makers invest in a project, they’re likely to keep doing so, because of the money already at stake. Rather than dramatically shrinking both the size and the number of its stores, Blockbuster just kept throwing good money after bad.

As for “clicks and mortar,” it’s a nice catchphrase, but there’s not much evidence that consumers really need a company to offer both: Blockbuster tried to make a selling point of the fact that you could rent a movie online and then return it to a store, instead of popping it in the mail, but the allure of this was lost on most people. In practice, “clicks and mortar” just meant that Blockbuster had to spend lots of money and time integrating an entirely new information-technology system into the one its stores already had. Meanwhile, Netflix could focus on making its distribution system bigger and more efficient, in large part because it was starting from scratch. Similarly, in the late nineteenth century, department stores like Macy’s tried to enter the mail-order business that Sears had pioneered, but, since Sears had been designed around the mail-order business, its competitors were unable to catch up.

Unlike Sears, though, Netflix isn’t going to have decades in which to bask in its success. Its domination of the DVD-rental market comes just as people are moving toward streaming and downloadable video. As has already happened with music, the business of renting and selling movies will soon be about moving digital files rather than physical objects. Streaming is already a big part of Netflix’s business, and it has signed up partnerships to let consumers get movies via video-game machines, Blu-Ray players, and so on. But this is a market in which Netflix’s expertise in shipping red envelopes as quickly and efficiently as possible will no longer be a competitive advantage. It’s a market that’s already quite crowded—with Amazon, Apple, the cable companies, and now Google (which just rolled out its own TV product) all competing. And it’s a market that remains wide open technologically—no one really knows how, or on what devices, most people will watch movies in the future. In this environment, it would be easy for Netflix to fall back on its safety cushion, milk the existing DVD business for all it’s worth, and try to slow down customers’ migration into streaming, particularly since a customer who streams movies is less lucrative than one who rents three DVDs a month. But then, a decade from now, we’d be writing Netflix obituaries that sounded just like the ones for Blockbuster. Sometimes you have to destroy your business in order to save it. ♦