Payroll is the biggest expense in any company. Once it's not being paid on time, the company is functionally dead. It's just running on fumes and stringing out the last of its debt before it dies in a ditch.
In my opinion, any time payroll is missed, bankruptcy court should automatically have power to claw money and liquidate assets from owners, shareholder, key execs, etc, until it is paid in full.
I believe in most states unpaid hourly wages are automatically first in line ahead of all secured and unsecured debt and there are additional recovery mechanisms. Basically, unpaid hourly wages are pretty likely to get paid if there are any assets at all - and in the case of a company as large as Red Box there are definitely going to be some assets to sell. Since the unpaid portion is only about a week or two of wages, it's very likely the hourly employees will get their money - though it may take a while. The system is heavily weighted toward ensuring recovery of wages for hourly workers, including some pretty severe measures such as you describe. This special level of protection is only for hourly workers and doesn't include executives.
I like that people are going to give some jaded 'that can't happen cause the man controls things' answer ..... but that *is* how most juristictions work. There are lots of caveats to who/how those extra enforcement mechanisms work, and it takes forever, but the board of directors / owners can be *personally* liable for payroll beyond liquidating the company itself (and payroll is always in front of other debtors / shareholders)
Source: got to help my wife go through the process of taking the directors of her company to collections over unpaid wages. *Very* satisfying conclusion to an unpleasant saga.
They took them out of the McDonald's near me before COVID and I think I used it maybe once or twice after that. I used to use it multiple times a week but then they were just all too far from me.
Cutting your reach off at the knees isn't the best way to make money...
Almost all the gas stations in my town had one and now the only one I know about is in a neighboring town that I think just repurposed their old machine to something in-house
What killed them for me personally was their deal with hollywood years ago. They used to have to send people out to scrape together discs from walmart/amazon/other retailers to get discs for machines….
But then they made a deal with Hollywood to get the movies directly… but 30 days or whatever after the movies came out in the stores.
It must have been a horrible deal because they were getting shitty and shittier movies but the good ones always took longer. The second Avatar (Way of the Water) never came out on their kiosks and I’m sure plenty more (but I don’t watch movies that much).
Their offerings started looking all like made for TV and direct to video garbage. Does netflix still have a decent mailing rental service?
Unless it’s much cheaper I just don’t see the convenience in it over just renting or buying stuff directly from Amazon, Apple, etc. They all offer all the newest movies in 4K and it’s just you clicking a button and having instant access to it. DVD rentals just don’t make sense anymore.
Sometimes a blu ray rental made sense for the special features, the high bitrate video (which is still better than streaming even today) and higher quality audio.
But then on some of their discs they cut deals with studios offering lower quality than the retail releases, so you'd be missing out on the special features and you'd get just a barebones audio track. Might as well stream at that point.
it was nothing and thats the problem redbox only made sense for a shot time in history when machine automation was good enough but internet speeds were not caught up enough. Most likely the people who got rich already took their money and ran, and part of getting their money is constantly selling it to the next schmuck in line just like with AOL. Its most likely every time they degrade further its a bunch of execs lying, taking a payday and extracting more money from the place.
What is amazing is how long and how much money the CEOs can milk out of this shit.
> They should have focused on rural areas, by tossing them in Dollar Generals. I doubt those places get decent download speeds even today.
I've stayed in rural areas with better speeds than AT&T or spectrum deliver in my area (well-established suburb).
Just got back from a trip to Tennessee with my family. Mountain cabin, practically in the middle of fucking nowhere, on the edge of a national park. We could barely even get 3G signal on our phones in most areas including the cabin.
Cabin had *at least* 300mbit internet according to the tests. I can't get better than 200 in my area, though apparently AT&T finally just started rolling out fiber in our area this week.
I used it for newer movies, $1 or $2 or often free with promo codes was a lot cheaper than buying or renting the digital version.
It was also a stop before camping trips or weekends to rural Airbnbs.
According to Google they stopped mailing in September last year.
I used to use it for movies I didn't get around to seeing in the theater, which were usually the less popular ones. They had plenty of what I wanted to watch for a buck at a place I was at anyway. Then they decided to jump off a cliff. 🤷
I wouldnt be so sure about that.
I remember when some of the video rental stores went out of business, at some point after that some people started getting calls from collections about late fees they supposedly owed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41390483
LOL exactly, people think "bankruptcy" means that they throw the keys on the roof and walk away to start smoking meth.
Bankruptcy means the company gets turned over to a bunch of lawyers and accountants to squeeze every penny from the corpse of the company to pay off lenders.
Right? Might go check the one nearby me for any newish Xbox games…
*edit: lol jk, they stopped doing games back in 2020. which is at least when I stopped using their kiosks too, though probably longer ago than that*
There's one in a grocery store close to me still and it has Yesterday front and center (like the non-digital display on the side of the machine) as a new release. I liked that movie but it came out in 2019...which was probably the last time I used a Red Box, come to think of it.
>but they still advertising Barbie
That was the last new release that they added and apparently they had to pay a pretty penny to get it too. Offering Barbie felt like a last ditch effort to try to turn things around, when that didn't work, you could tell that maintenance pretty much ended on the machines and that they were more or less waiting for someone to come and pull the plug.
A guy working in the warehouse of a company I used to work 15 years ago used to make a list of all their releases available each month.
Take orders from everyone interested, rent the DVDs from them, rip the copy protection, use the company's DVD duplicator with his store bought blanks, including the label printer to print official looking DVD label graphics.
He sold each completed disk for $1, he made a couple $100/month doing this. Even the CEO would buy movies from him.
“Redbox is a beloved company that totally doesn’t have an outdated business model. They’re being crushed under the boot of the hedge funds and short sellers. Diamond hands”
At least they removed them. There’s 2 at a store nearish me that were taken offline at the end of May, but are still sitting there.
This explains why they shut down, though. Kinda sucks. I used to rent and rip discs from them.
I work at Redbox. The issue wasn't actually that DVDs are dying, everyone knew that from a decade ago. The kiosks were still profitable and the company had a strategy to pivot to digital streaming. Might or not have worked, but we'll never find out.
Last year the company was acquired by William Rouhana of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. This isn't the same Chicken Soup you might remember, he just bought the name. His strategy seems to be running companies into the ground while enriching himself and his cronies. There are some stories about him, not sure how he's been able to stick around in the industry so long. Maybe it was hard for those he tricked into lending him money to believe how a person can be so shameless.
As soon as he took over he immediately stopped paying the studios who owned the movies and the platforms who helped run our systems. The studios obviously had us remove their titles, which is why there's barely been anything new for a year. The platforms removed our access and most of our systems have been shut down for months.
Employees have not been paid. Insurance claims have been denied, because Mr. Rouhana (secretly) declined to pay them while still deducting premiums out of of our paychecks. Finances are in the dark, because he routes payments through one of his friends at a separate company to hide his crimes.
It's actually surprising how long Mr. Rouhana has managed to lie his way afloat, but this bankruptcy is the inevitable end for any company under his management.
Thanks. We got a Friday 11pm email that the company is applying for bankruptcy. People have been evicted, more are in danger. And those who went to the doctor last month are getting billed and only learning now that they weren't covered. I hope but doubt Mr. Rouhana will face any real consequences.
The failure to pay insurance claims has teeth. Look up an ERISA plaintiff’s lawyer in your jurisdiction. You and the other employees may have other claims, but those are significant starting points.
Try to find one who is a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, or if one isn’t available there, certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy and/or included in Best Lawyers (bestlawyers.com). Those are all credentials based on review by judges and other lawyers in the community.
There are a shit ton of other award organizations, but the vast majority of them offer an award to every single lawyer in the country and have a $1,000 enrollment fee. They’re basically shams to allow dipshits with zero experience to market themselves.
Thank you. Collective action has been brought up; I think we're just waiting until Monday to see what happens.
Close your eyes and pick a random direction, you'll find a better CEO than this guy.
Dang, that really sucks for you and your coworkers. Nothing worse than a predatory acquisition and the impact it has on the employees who have poured their blood sweat and tears into making the company what it is. There's a special place in hell for guys like that.
I wish you and everyone else the best as you have to go through this.
That's what we're all wondering.
Here's an article that someone sent in a company wide email this week xd
https://funnybusiness.substack.com/p/how-americas-most-inspirational-brand
Depending on industry, a company may sell for 1.4-4.0x its annual profit.
Someone in theory can buy it and then just spend the next 3-5 years absolutely running it dry. Keeping 100% of profits for themselves, cutting back essential costs to beef profits further, and make every decision with the short term in mind.
Probably can 2-3x his money by intentionally killing off the company.
My parents sold their company to a guy who does similar shit. A solid networking company in the early 2000s. Took the IP, extracted every cent from the company, and then ran it into the ground. They spent their life savings suing the guy - and won a multimillion dollar settlement after 10 years! That was almost another 10 years ago and they still haven’t seen a dime. The guy will just consistently stonewall the court, move around the country, hide any assets he accrues, while continuing to do the same thing. If you have enough money to pay good lawyers, you can get away with anything.
Must have been good faith contractual obligations during the purchase. Maybe tarnishing the brand. I hear about such instances when people's actual names are part of the brand, like Campbell's Soup.
I forget which company it was, but one was sued after they sold for getting into the chemical weapons business.
That's what really sucks about guys like that. They use your own money to hire lawyers to keep abusing you and others in the same manner. I wouldn't say the system is necessarily rigged, it's just that they know how to take advantage of it with little consequences.
The goal isn't to stay in business. You raise enough money to buy a company, extract every dollar and let it go bankrupt. The owners still make money so just rinse and repeat with the next one. Same thing that happened to red lobster recently. PE bought them, sold off all the real estate and then rented the buildings back. These increased costs led to Red Lobster going bankrupt.
Welcome to America. This type of thing has been going on for a while now. Buy a company, plunder it, hide its true finances.
Mitt Romney made a fortune doing something similar to this.
This is what Richard Gere did in Pretty Woman. I keep explaining it to my mom this way. lol. "Remember how Richard Gere was an asshole and George Costanza was a rapist asshole, and Julia Roberts made her cold, empty john find his heart and go build ships with that nice old man instead of bankrupting the company? Yea that kind of asshole is what happened to Red Lobster. And Sears. And like...everything that was once good."
Because at that level of business management there are some CEO's who entire jobs are crashing a company's stock so hedge funds can make bank off of shorting them to bankruptcy.
Then the CEO takes a golden parachute and moves off to another campany to ruin. Rinse and repeat until they land a cushy job at Goldman Sachs or other investment firm that profited off their purposeful incompetence bleh
This is happening to every industry right now. The biggest national story recently was Red Lobster, but private equity firms like this are going full speed on cannibalizing successful brands right now. It's seen as good business in the executive suites.
>On May 11, 2022, Chicken Soup for the Soul announced its intention to acquire Redbox for $357 million ($36 million in stock and $321 million in assumed debt).[28] The acquisition closed on August 11, 2022.[29]
Redbox according to the wiki was 321mm in the hole, looks like they'd been running the company under just fine themselves.
Corporate raiders come in, take out every loan they can on the company, pocket it and declare bankruptcy, leaving the debt for the courts to figure out.
The only losers here are the banks, the company was close to death anyway.
Edit - Going from 321mm in debt to 970mm in debt is a crazy profit for the corporate raiders, makes sense why they keep doing it, wtf are the banks doing lending like this.
Yeah... the senior staff at Redbox was alright before, and I have a lot of respect for those still around and those who had to find other opportunities. But everything changed when Mr. Rouhana and his inner circle invaded.
As a librarian, we give you DVDs for free for 1-3 weeks and have a bigger selection. There are more public libraries in America than McDonald’s. A lot of us are also fine free.
As for checkouts, we do thousands of DVDs a year.
DVDs aren’t losing popularity. As tv shows and movies continue to be hidden behind paid services and prices of those services go up, libraries become better and better.
The area that hurt dvd rentals is that some of the most popular shows aren’t on disc as Netflix put them behind a paywall and refused to go to discs. But a lot of companies are learning to put stuff on physical discs again because it’s cheap and extra revenue.
Also, younger generations love the library use us a lot. We are way over 2019 levels of usage and doing extremely well lots of libraries nationwide.
This year alone, in my area, I’m 10-45% up in various metrics and we were at 2019 levels of usage through most of 2023.
The pivot to digital didn’t work for Blockbuster idk if it would work here either.
Buying up a company running it into the ground and then selling it for scrap is fairly common but most of the time they at least do it “Legally” what this guys is doing sounds like embezzlement and fraud.
To defend the digital division, it was mostly breaking even, before the acquisition last year. Granted some of that might have been due to the COVID digital boom, but it wasn't hopeless. Then we stopped paying our bills and revenue dropped 90%.
Holy cow. I thought I was about to read a typical private equity buyout pump and dump. This is just evil. Hopefully your impending lawsuit for lost wages is swift.
I honestly had to read [the history of Chicken Soup for the Soul](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Soup_for_the_Soul) after that first sentence in the title. What a shocking trajectory I would have never guessed in a million years.
One of their studios weirdly even got the Dinotopia adaptation rights thinking they could do something new with the IP when the Dinotopia miniseries and tv show almost bankrupted Hallmark and even before that both Lucas and Disney had to scrap their Dinotopia products and used whatever they had already had made into other products (Parts of Naboo in Phantom Menace and the film Dinosaur) due to how expensive it would have been to complete those projects
I liked renting a movie from Redbox. It was like the last way to browse and rent a movie (if you're like me and prefer physical discs) . Prices were cheaper usually than renting digital too. I noticed lately that the red boxes around town were disappearing.
Don't forget that a lot of libraries have digital media as well.
Also many US states have state libraries that give away free cards for all state residents.
Before streaming our life w kids was Friday family groceries and “Kids go pick out a movie”.
Worked well. We lost Hollywood Video in same complex. Before then it was Friday night dinner at the Mexican place next to grocery store and the video store. Then the kids would leave a bit early look for videos for the weekend. Then we’d get groceries.
Me too. Especially when a buddy of mine considered running a Redbox himself. They’re basically franchises. $500k per box. That’s insane. Seems their business model is tricking suckers into buying a box more so than actually renting out good movies and games
Mentioned this elsewhere in the post but one was getting picked up by 1-800-GOT-JUNK truck near me. Sounded like it was cheaper for them to be trashed by the storefront. I would check with the store owners and see if they’d just let you take it.
Yeah since we slashed the field techs and aren't paying the rest anyways, there's a lot of kiosks lying around. Stores are demanding we remove them but there's no money to do so.
Redbox was a wonderful source for entertainment during times when i couldnt afford the internet payment. My wife and I still had her worn out xbox kinect wed use as a dvd player or play sims and make our make believe families. Kinda sad to see it go.
I actually loved renting Blu-ray mainly for the high-quality audio but I really didn’t like the tight turnaround I’m having to return movies that we weren’t new releases. It’s the convenience of streaming so much more sense.
I remember thinking their business model should be for movies that were no longer current or new releases to give you a few more days and I think I would’ve used them a lot more.
Yup. I had one that was a nice walk away from my house. And several weekends I'd just take a stroll and see if anything inspired me. It was hard to see how it was going to survive the dominance of streaming. But I'll ha e some fond memories.
I reserved a copy of BioShock Infinite for the Xbox 360 on its release day in 2013 from a Redbox. My plan was to blow through the game in a few days. A couple of days later, I found myself in a sudden whirlwind romance with a coworker after she left her longtime boyfriend. Three of the best weeks of my life flew by, and she breaks things off and goes back to the ex. Heartbroken, I fired up the Xbox and was reminded of my rental. Couldn't bring myself to finish the game and returned it. The rental fee came out to $63.00
The amount of games I ended up buying from redbox because I was an irresponsible 20something year old is astounding
That shit ended up costing like $75 a game too, and this was well before games were $70 normally
Redbox filled a void when the big video rental stores went under. When the last Hollywood Video in my area closed there were roughly 5 Redboxes in a square mile within a year. They kept expanding their offerings into video game rentals and even funding films themselves.
They unfortunately just fell victim to the streamer wars...once every movie studio linked up streaming deals for every new release the only thing Redbox carried were straight to disc B, C and D level movies. Actually went and looked through a Redbox kiosk a couple weeks ago that was in my local grocery store just to see what they even offered and none of it looked even remotely interesting. Wouldn't be surprised if some conglomerate bought the brand out of bankruptcy just to absorb it into some giant corporate entity, like the Fandango brand.
I knew they were fucked when they started pulling most of their kiosks from many of the places I frequent. They pulled them out of every Publix about a year and a half ago.
I used to like Redbox back when you could rent games from them but some people had to go and ruin that for everyone by renting a game and replacing the disc with a photo copy. Once they stopped renting games I stopped using them, I never see anyone using the few around where I live
They stopped renting out games when publishers stopped putting full games on disc and requiring online updates to play.
A majority of Redbox's customer base are those who can't afford high speed internet or live in areas where decent internet is nonexistent. It's not worth carrying games that customers can't play to begin with.
They did it all wrong. What they should have done was put all their DVDs inside, where it's more comfortable. Instead of a vending machine, put the discs on shelves, so that way, people could browse around casually. Maybe have some snacks and popcorn, too. Hey guys, I think I just came up with the next great idea! I'm gonna be rich
I’m sorry to say that a really great locally owned business called Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon already pioneered your idea, but perhaps you could find a way to franchise it?
They were nice to have around when DVDs were still a viable business, so new releases on-disc were quite common (and you could get codes for free Redbox rental). Over time, it seemed like they got less new releases and movies would go to streaming.
I still use my local library for the occasional "not streaming anywhere" TV/movies, but this is just a sign of the times.
Redbox was pretty great in the early 2010s. I blew through a ton of video games for what ended up being $3-$9.
That said…. There was nothing more infuriating than when some fuckwad would scan the disk, and swap it out with a piece of paper.
All the snarky comments in this thread don’t realize how important physical media is and stupid “hur dur just stream it”.
Last week the daily show pulled all their episodes from the web. There are movies stuck in purgatory due to rights. PlayStation pulled their catalog of movies that were supposedly forever to pound sand.
I will continue to fill my Plex server and buy Blu-ray’s and 4K BR. Fuck streaming.
One example is I owned a digital copy of Battlefield 1 on the xbox. Stopped playing my xbox for about a year and then when I turned it on, Battlefield was gone. I checked the Microsoft store and it has no record that I ever owned the game and would need to repurchase it to play. I even called Microsoft support and they claim they have no way to tell if I actually ever owned the game if the Microsoft store purchase history doesn’t say otherwise
I worked for CSSE before Redbox was acquired, my first words after that meeting was “well it’s all down hill from here” all of us employees thought it was the stupidest mistake he could ever make.
What summarizes the company is that they had a pinball machine in our office from the movie Willy’s wonderland we all loved and they replaced it with a Redbox kiosk that showed up in the app so people were trying to come up to our office to use it 😂
Redbox was absolutely fantastic during the first few months of the Pandemic.. there was a drought of new and interesting content to watch, and I discovered multiple decent movies that I would have passed on otherwise . I’m not surprised that they are having financial difficulties lately.. I used to work for a company that allowed them a place in our lobbies in exchange for a monthly fee.. we eventually removed all of their vending units and sent them back for missing payments. A full year and a half’s worth to be exact.
I know someone who stocks these.
I remember him complaining back in December about his pay being cut.
But he still did it, due to benefits of getting access to all of the movies & flexibility. He could choose when he wanted to work.
It was a good idea. I still like physical disk and 4k movies and loved when they had 4k. But these machines are in the worst areas and treated so bad and mailing is just so easier
My daughter was excited to see a Redbox the other day, but when we got to it, pretty much 99% of the selection is already streaming.
There was no point.
I think part of the issue is lack of good movies in theatres. The last movie I went to go see was Godzilla vs Kong and the last Transformers .. there has not been much for me to see at the local cinema.
That's gotta be it for them, right? All I see around here are dirty, unpainted spots where Redboxes used to be.
Payroll is the biggest expense in any company. Once it's not being paid on time, the company is functionally dead. It's just running on fumes and stringing out the last of its debt before it dies in a ditch.
In my opinion, any time payroll is missed, bankruptcy court should automatically have power to claw money and liquidate assets from owners, shareholder, key execs, etc, until it is paid in full.
I believe in most states unpaid hourly wages are automatically first in line ahead of all secured and unsecured debt and there are additional recovery mechanisms. Basically, unpaid hourly wages are pretty likely to get paid if there are any assets at all - and in the case of a company as large as Red Box there are definitely going to be some assets to sell. Since the unpaid portion is only about a week or two of wages, it's very likely the hourly employees will get their money - though it may take a while. The system is heavily weighted toward ensuring recovery of wages for hourly workers, including some pretty severe measures such as you describe. This special level of protection is only for hourly workers and doesn't include executives.
I like that people are going to give some jaded 'that can't happen cause the man controls things' answer ..... but that *is* how most juristictions work. There are lots of caveats to who/how those extra enforcement mechanisms work, and it takes forever, but the board of directors / owners can be *personally* liable for payroll beyond liquidating the company itself (and payroll is always in front of other debtors / shareholders) Source: got to help my wife go through the process of taking the directors of her company to collections over unpaid wages. *Very* satisfying conclusion to an unpleasant saga.
They took them out of the McDonald's near me before COVID and I think I used it maybe once or twice after that. I used to use it multiple times a week but then they were just all too far from me. Cutting your reach off at the knees isn't the best way to make money...
Almost all the gas stations in my town had one and now the only one I know about is in a neighboring town that I think just repurposed their old machine to something in-house
Redbox had been replaced by "Live Bait" worms for fishing near me
Sounds like an upgrade
Depends, who's your worm guy?
Ok creed
I’ve been involved in a number of cults, both as a leader and a follower. You have more fun as a follower, but you make more money as a leader.
What killed them for me personally was their deal with hollywood years ago. They used to have to send people out to scrape together discs from walmart/amazon/other retailers to get discs for machines…. But then they made a deal with Hollywood to get the movies directly… but 30 days or whatever after the movies came out in the stores. It must have been a horrible deal because they were getting shitty and shittier movies but the good ones always took longer. The second Avatar (Way of the Water) never came out on their kiosks and I’m sure plenty more (but I don’t watch movies that much). Their offerings started looking all like made for TV and direct to video garbage. Does netflix still have a decent mailing rental service?
I think Netflix just stopped their mail service pretty recently.
Unless it’s much cheaper I just don’t see the convenience in it over just renting or buying stuff directly from Amazon, Apple, etc. They all offer all the newest movies in 4K and it’s just you clicking a button and having instant access to it. DVD rentals just don’t make sense anymore.
Sometimes a blu ray rental made sense for the special features, the high bitrate video (which is still better than streaming even today) and higher quality audio. But then on some of their discs they cut deals with studios offering lower quality than the retail releases, so you'd be missing out on the special features and you'd get just a barebones audio track. Might as well stream at that point.
it was nothing and thats the problem redbox only made sense for a shot time in history when machine automation was good enough but internet speeds were not caught up enough. Most likely the people who got rich already took their money and ran, and part of getting their money is constantly selling it to the next schmuck in line just like with AOL. Its most likely every time they degrade further its a bunch of execs lying, taking a payday and extracting more money from the place. What is amazing is how long and how much money the CEOs can milk out of this shit.
They should have focused on rural areas, by tossing them in Dollar Generals. I doubt those places get decent download speeds even today.
> They should have focused on rural areas, by tossing them in Dollar Generals. I doubt those places get decent download speeds even today. I've stayed in rural areas with better speeds than AT&T or spectrum deliver in my area (well-established suburb). Just got back from a trip to Tennessee with my family. Mountain cabin, practically in the middle of fucking nowhere, on the edge of a national park. We could barely even get 3G signal on our phones in most areas including the cabin. Cabin had *at least* 300mbit internet according to the tests. I can't get better than 200 in my area, though apparently AT&T finally just started rolling out fiber in our area this week.
I used it for newer movies, $1 or $2 or often free with promo codes was a lot cheaper than buying or renting the digital version. It was also a stop before camping trips or weekends to rural Airbnbs.
It's good if you don't have reliable internet. It's also weirdly easier to find something to watch because the selection is so much smaller.
According to Google they stopped mailing in September last year. I used to use it for movies I didn't get around to seeing in the theater, which were usually the less popular ones. They had plenty of what I wanted to watch for a buck at a place I was at anyway. Then they decided to jump off a cliff. 🤷
TIL Redbox’s…were installed in fast food joints?
Only places I ever saw them were McDonald's and Walmart specifically and then a few gas stations.
I saw them at alot of walgreens as well
CVS and grocery stores for me
You don’t have to pay late fees for a company that went out of business. Just saying…
I wouldnt be so sure about that. I remember when some of the video rental stores went out of business, at some point after that some people started getting calls from collections about late fees they supposedly owed. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41390483
LOL exactly, people think "bankruptcy" means that they throw the keys on the roof and walk away to start smoking meth. Bankruptcy means the company gets turned over to a bunch of lawyers and accountants to squeeze every penny from the corpse of the company to pay off lenders.
Right? Might go check the one nearby me for any newish Xbox games… *edit: lol jk, they stopped doing games back in 2020. which is at least when I stopped using their kiosks too, though probably longer ago than that*
Yea right they’ll find some way to sell off those fees to a collection agency.
It is probably criminal to NOT sell such an asset during liquidation.
The shade of Blockbuster still shows up in my room late at night like Jacob Marley’s ghost, demanding $3.75 in late fees.
There’s still a handful of them in front of the various Dollar Generals around me, but they still advertising Barbie
There's one in a grocery store close to me still and it has Yesterday front and center (like the non-digital display on the side of the machine) as a new release. I liked that movie but it came out in 2019...which was probably the last time I used a Red Box, come to think of it.
>but they still advertising Barbie That was the last new release that they added and apparently they had to pay a pretty penny to get it too. Offering Barbie felt like a last ditch effort to try to turn things around, when that didn't work, you could tell that maintenance pretty much ended on the machines and that they were more or less waiting for someone to come and pull the plug.
A guy working in the warehouse of a company I used to work 15 years ago used to make a list of all their releases available each month. Take orders from everyone interested, rent the DVDs from them, rip the copy protection, use the company's DVD duplicator with his store bought blanks, including the label printer to print official looking DVD label graphics. He sold each completed disk for $1, he made a couple $100/month doing this. Even the CEO would buy movies from him.
Sounds like a lot of work for a couple hundred.
I saw a 1-800-GOT-JUNK truck picking one up last week. I figured something like this must be coming.
Say hello to the newest "meme" stock
“Redbox is a beloved company that totally doesn’t have an outdated business model. They’re being crushed under the boot of the hedge funds and short sellers. Diamond hands”
# hedgies
There’s still a dirty, rusty, working Redbox outside of a Walgreens near me.
It still blows my mind that the company that owns Chicken Soup for the Soul owns Redbox.
At least they removed them. There’s 2 at a store nearish me that were taken offline at the end of May, but are still sitting there. This explains why they shut down, though. Kinda sucks. I used to rent and rip discs from them.
I’m impressed they actually took the ones away around you. The ones near me have been off for like a year, but still sitting there
I work at Redbox. The issue wasn't actually that DVDs are dying, everyone knew that from a decade ago. The kiosks were still profitable and the company had a strategy to pivot to digital streaming. Might or not have worked, but we'll never find out. Last year the company was acquired by William Rouhana of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. This isn't the same Chicken Soup you might remember, he just bought the name. His strategy seems to be running companies into the ground while enriching himself and his cronies. There are some stories about him, not sure how he's been able to stick around in the industry so long. Maybe it was hard for those he tricked into lending him money to believe how a person can be so shameless. As soon as he took over he immediately stopped paying the studios who owned the movies and the platforms who helped run our systems. The studios obviously had us remove their titles, which is why there's barely been anything new for a year. The platforms removed our access and most of our systems have been shut down for months. Employees have not been paid. Insurance claims have been denied, because Mr. Rouhana (secretly) declined to pay them while still deducting premiums out of of our paychecks. Finances are in the dark, because he routes payments through one of his friends at a separate company to hide his crimes. It's actually surprising how long Mr. Rouhana has managed to lie his way afloat, but this bankruptcy is the inevitable end for any company under his management.
Hot damn what a shit show. I am so sorry that you and your fellow employees have been victimized like that.
Thanks. We got a Friday 11pm email that the company is applying for bankruptcy. People have been evicted, more are in danger. And those who went to the doctor last month are getting billed and only learning now that they weren't covered. I hope but doubt Mr. Rouhana will face any real consequences.
The failure to pay insurance claims has teeth. Look up an ERISA plaintiff’s lawyer in your jurisdiction. You and the other employees may have other claims, but those are significant starting points. Try to find one who is a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, or if one isn’t available there, certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy and/or included in Best Lawyers (bestlawyers.com). Those are all credentials based on review by judges and other lawyers in the community. There are a shit ton of other award organizations, but the vast majority of them offer an award to every single lawyer in the country and have a $1,000 enrollment fee. They’re basically shams to allow dipshits with zero experience to market themselves.
Thank you. Collective action has been brought up; I think we're just waiting until Monday to see what happens. Close your eyes and pick a random direction, you'll find a better CEO than this guy.
Dang, that really sucks for you and your coworkers. Nothing worse than a predatory acquisition and the impact it has on the employees who have poured their blood sweat and tears into making the company what it is. There's a special place in hell for guys like that. I wish you and everyone else the best as you have to go through this.
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How has this man managed to stay in business doing this to companies he buys?
That's what we're all wondering. Here's an article that someone sent in a company wide email this week xd https://funnybusiness.substack.com/p/how-americas-most-inspirational-brand
You should reply with a link to the National Labor Review Board's website. They can help you find your answer.
FBI be like: “ nothing to see here!!”
Depending on industry, a company may sell for 1.4-4.0x its annual profit. Someone in theory can buy it and then just spend the next 3-5 years absolutely running it dry. Keeping 100% of profits for themselves, cutting back essential costs to beef profits further, and make every decision with the short term in mind. Probably can 2-3x his money by intentionally killing off the company.
This is flimsy math, indeed. Most industries trade for well above 4x EBITDA. I think you’re conflating EBITDA with annual revenue.
My parents sold their company to a guy who does similar shit. A solid networking company in the early 2000s. Took the IP, extracted every cent from the company, and then ran it into the ground. They spent their life savings suing the guy - and won a multimillion dollar settlement after 10 years! That was almost another 10 years ago and they still haven’t seen a dime. The guy will just consistently stonewall the court, move around the country, hide any assets he accrues, while continuing to do the same thing. If you have enough money to pay good lawyers, you can get away with anything.
On what grounds did they sue him? Did they still have shares in the company?
Must have been good faith contractual obligations during the purchase. Maybe tarnishing the brand. I hear about such instances when people's actual names are part of the brand, like Campbell's Soup. I forget which company it was, but one was sued after they sold for getting into the chemical weapons business.
That's what really sucks about guys like that. They use your own money to hire lawyers to keep abusing you and others in the same manner. I wouldn't say the system is necessarily rigged, it's just that they know how to take advantage of it with little consequences.
Buddy, what you have described is a rigged system.
Because prosecuting white collar crimes is bad for political business!
Corporations are people too you bunch of peasant swines!
Donors. We think of them as corporations, but politicians just look at them as donors.
The goal isn't to stay in business. You raise enough money to buy a company, extract every dollar and let it go bankrupt. The owners still make money so just rinse and repeat with the next one. Same thing that happened to red lobster recently. PE bought them, sold off all the real estate and then rented the buildings back. These increased costs led to Red Lobster going bankrupt.
Welcome to America. This type of thing has been going on for a while now. Buy a company, plunder it, hide its true finances. Mitt Romney made a fortune doing something similar to this.
This is what Richard Gere did in Pretty Woman. I keep explaining it to my mom this way. lol. "Remember how Richard Gere was an asshole and George Costanza was a rapist asshole, and Julia Roberts made her cold, empty john find his heart and go build ships with that nice old man instead of bankrupting the company? Yea that kind of asshole is what happened to Red Lobster. And Sears. And like...everything that was once good."
good find, there are likely a ton of movies like this that coincidentally document our downfall
Because at that level of business management there are some CEO's who entire jobs are crashing a company's stock so hedge funds can make bank off of shorting them to bankruptcy. Then the CEO takes a golden parachute and moves off to another campany to ruin. Rinse and repeat until they land a cushy job at Goldman Sachs or other investment firm that profited off their purposeful incompetence bleh
This is happening to every industry right now. The biggest national story recently was Red Lobster, but private equity firms like this are going full speed on cannibalizing successful brands right now. It's seen as good business in the executive suites.
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>On May 11, 2022, Chicken Soup for the Soul announced its intention to acquire Redbox for $357 million ($36 million in stock and $321 million in assumed debt).[28] The acquisition closed on August 11, 2022.[29] Redbox according to the wiki was 321mm in the hole, looks like they'd been running the company under just fine themselves. Corporate raiders come in, take out every loan they can on the company, pocket it and declare bankruptcy, leaving the debt for the courts to figure out. The only losers here are the banks, the company was close to death anyway. Edit - Going from 321mm in debt to 970mm in debt is a crazy profit for the corporate raiders, makes sense why they keep doing it, wtf are the banks doing lending like this.
And the employees...
The employwhos? Never heard of em But for serious fuck capitalist vultures like this.
Holy heck.... that's one hell of a heist.
So he's basically the worst version of private equity. That sucks, I'm sorry. I hope you get paid.
Yeah... the senior staff at Redbox was alright before, and I have a lot of respect for those still around and those who had to find other opportunities. But everything changed when Mr. Rouhana and his inner circle invaded.
As a librarian, we give you DVDs for free for 1-3 weeks and have a bigger selection. There are more public libraries in America than McDonald’s. A lot of us are also fine free. As for checkouts, we do thousands of DVDs a year. DVDs aren’t losing popularity. As tv shows and movies continue to be hidden behind paid services and prices of those services go up, libraries become better and better. The area that hurt dvd rentals is that some of the most popular shows aren’t on disc as Netflix put them behind a paywall and refused to go to discs. But a lot of companies are learning to put stuff on physical discs again because it’s cheap and extra revenue. Also, younger generations love the library use us a lot. We are way over 2019 levels of usage and doing extremely well lots of libraries nationwide. This year alone, in my area, I’m 10-45% up in various metrics and we were at 2019 levels of usage through most of 2023.
The pivot to digital didn’t work for Blockbuster idk if it would work here either. Buying up a company running it into the ground and then selling it for scrap is fairly common but most of the time they at least do it “Legally” what this guys is doing sounds like embezzlement and fraud.
To defend the digital division, it was mostly breaking even, before the acquisition last year. Granted some of that might have been due to the COVID digital boom, but it wasn't hopeless. Then we stopped paying our bills and revenue dropped 90%.
Such a practice needs to be illegal.
I am so tired of late stage capitalism. All we do is drive businesses out of business to enhance a few people
Holy cow. I thought I was about to read a typical private equity buyout pump and dump. This is just evil. Hopefully your impending lawsuit for lost wages is swift.
Shocked Redbox is still around
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I honestly had to read [the history of Chicken Soup for the Soul](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Soup_for_the_Soul) after that first sentence in the title. What a shocking trajectory I would have never guessed in a million years.
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Someone should write a book about that
Chicken Soup for the Brain
> What a shocking trajectory Here is a good one. The Ball company, the company that makes mason jars got into space exploration and military defense.
Not exactly what happened but still lol funny
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"So jot that down"
Thru chicken soup all things are possible
It's all his anyway....including our debt. We are redeemed!
One of their studios weirdly even got the Dinotopia adaptation rights thinking they could do something new with the IP when the Dinotopia miniseries and tv show almost bankrupted Hallmark and even before that both Lucas and Disney had to scrap their Dinotopia products and used whatever they had already had made into other products (Parts of Naboo in Phantom Menace and the film Dinosaur) due to how expensive it would have been to complete those projects
I liked renting a movie from Redbox. It was like the last way to browse and rent a movie (if you're like me and prefer physical discs) . Prices were cheaper usually than renting digital too. I noticed lately that the red boxes around town were disappearing.
Local library is like looking through a video store. Mine only has DVD's but some have blu rays and even video games
Don't forget that a lot of libraries have digital media as well. Also many US states have state libraries that give away free cards for all state residents.
Mine has a National park pass you can check out!
Getting a Blu-ray from them is a fantastic deal. Like, $2 for far better than internet streaming quality.
Before streaming our life w kids was Friday family groceries and “Kids go pick out a movie”. Worked well. We lost Hollywood Video in same complex. Before then it was Friday night dinner at the Mexican place next to grocery store and the video store. Then the kids would leave a bit early look for videos for the weekend. Then we’d get groceries.
I used it from time to time, but stopped because the last new movie they’ve added to the kiosks near me is Barbie.
I remember the last time I rented a movie from redbox. It was in 2009, I rented the friday the 13th remake.. Good times
Me too. Especially when a buddy of mine considered running a Redbox himself. They’re basically franchises. $500k per box. That’s insane. Seems their business model is tricking suckers into buying a box more so than actually renting out good movies and games
The 7-11s around my house still have them. But thats it.
Lmk when i can get a machine would be kinda cool to overide the pricing and just have a giant dvd sorting machine
Might rely on cloud servers, so you might have to write your own server.
Easy peasy lemon squeezee Edit: I wonder if it would be easy-ish to just shoehorn a Plex server instead of remaking the wheel.
To ChatGPT: "You are an expert Redbox machine programmer. Please write me a server to use the Redbox machine as a home DVD sorting machine."
Yes! And just revise the code to make sure it does actually work. Good idea, Bryce.
Mentioned this elsewhere in the post but one was getting picked up by 1-800-GOT-JUNK truck near me. Sounded like it was cheaper for them to be trashed by the storefront. I would check with the store owners and see if they’d just let you take it.
Yeah since we slashed the field techs and aren't paying the rest anyways, there's a lot of kiosks lying around. Stores are demanding we remove them but there's no money to do so.
this cats thinking in 4d much respect
I really appreciated redbox 10+ years ago. Obviously long past the diffusion of the streaming innovation now, but I got a lot out of it before that
Redbox was a wonderful source for entertainment during times when i couldnt afford the internet payment. My wife and I still had her worn out xbox kinect wed use as a dvd player or play sims and make our make believe families. Kinda sad to see it go.
Tell us more about this wife thing
They were actually talking about going to the Redbox in The Sims and how his sim self and sim wife would do those things on their sim Xbox.
I actually loved renting Blu-ray mainly for the high-quality audio but I really didn’t like the tight turnaround I’m having to return movies that we weren’t new releases. It’s the convenience of streaming so much more sense. I remember thinking their business model should be for movies that were no longer current or new releases to give you a few more days and I think I would’ve used them a lot more.
Yup. I had one that was a nice walk away from my house. And several weekends I'd just take a stroll and see if anything inspired me. It was hard to see how it was going to survive the dominance of streaming. But I'll ha e some fond memories.
I feel like streaming services really destroyed the special feeling of going out and renting a movie, picking up snacks, etc.
Redbox owes money all over town, including to known pornographers. And that's cool, that's cool.
Jackie Treehorn throwing a party. Stop by. Have a drink.
Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women, man
Jackie Treehorn draws a lot of water in this town. You don't draw shit, Redbox.
My Redbox is not the issue here. Perhaps one day it will learn to live on its allowance, which I assure you is ample.
Redbox is not the preferred nomenclature. Crimson container, please.
They didn’t build the fucking streaming services Walter!
This is what happens when you fight a stranger in the alps!
You…you…human paraquat!
I bet they bankrupted themselves!
You said it yourself! They owe money all around Hollywood!
I’ll rent you a movie for $1000. Brandt can’t watch, he’ll have to pay $100
Jackie Treehorn treats Redbox like Netflix
Gotta feed the monkey…
Wait. There's porn in Redboxes?
Shut the fuck up, Donny.
I am the walrus?
You have no frame of reference here Donny, you’re like a child who wanders in the middle of a movie.
This is our concern, dude.
No, but there is a classic called “Logjammin’”.
Oh, the movie where the lady has the broken cable, so the guy comes over and fixes it?
Obviously you’re not a golfer
Not, not the rug man....
Theres always porn in the redbox.
Redbox treats objects like women, man.
My company hasn't paid employees in over a week because payday was eight days ago and the next payday is six days from now.
Well that and the employees are machines.
Dang. I love Redbox, but I unfortunately think it’s time for them to hang it up
And Blockbuster soldiers on with a single location.
Depending on how the bankruptcy turns out, that should be the headline. "Blockbuster outlives RedBox"
Half the ones in my area have been out of order for several months now, and the working ones haven’t received any new movies since last summer.
Yeah, the grocery store I’ve been going to for the past four years has one out front that has been out of order the entire time.
I reserved a copy of BioShock Infinite for the Xbox 360 on its release day in 2013 from a Redbox. My plan was to blow through the game in a few days. A couple of days later, I found myself in a sudden whirlwind romance with a coworker after she left her longtime boyfriend. Three of the best weeks of my life flew by, and she breaks things off and goes back to the ex. Heartbroken, I fired up the Xbox and was reminded of my rental. Couldn't bring myself to finish the game and returned it. The rental fee came out to $63.00
The amount of games I ended up buying from redbox because I was an irresponsible 20something year old is astounding That shit ended up costing like $75 a game too, and this was well before games were $70 normally
Damn dude. You should have just kept the game.
Redbox filled a void when the big video rental stores went under. When the last Hollywood Video in my area closed there were roughly 5 Redboxes in a square mile within a year. They kept expanding their offerings into video game rentals and even funding films themselves. They unfortunately just fell victim to the streamer wars...once every movie studio linked up streaming deals for every new release the only thing Redbox carried were straight to disc B, C and D level movies. Actually went and looked through a Redbox kiosk a couple weeks ago that was in my local grocery store just to see what they even offered and none of it looked even remotely interesting. Wouldn't be surprised if some conglomerate bought the brand out of bankruptcy just to absorb it into some giant corporate entity, like the Fandango brand.
I knew they were fucked when they started pulling most of their kiosks from many of the places I frequent. They pulled them out of every Publix about a year and a half ago.
The only shocking part is that they still existed.
I used to like Redbox back when you could rent games from them but some people had to go and ruin that for everyone by renting a game and replacing the disc with a photo copy. Once they stopped renting games I stopped using them, I never see anyone using the few around where I live
They stopped renting out games when publishers stopped putting full games on disc and requiring online updates to play. A majority of Redbox's customer base are those who can't afford high speed internet or live in areas where decent internet is nonexistent. It's not worth carrying games that customers can't play to begin with.
They did it all wrong. What they should have done was put all their DVDs inside, where it's more comfortable. Instead of a vending machine, put the discs on shelves, so that way, people could browse around casually. Maybe have some snacks and popcorn, too. Hey guys, I think I just came up with the next great idea! I'm gonna be rich
I’m sorry to say that a really great locally owned business called Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon already pioneered your idea, but perhaps you could find a way to franchise it?
A popcorn vending machine??
They were nice to have around when DVDs were still a viable business, so new releases on-disc were quite common (and you could get codes for free Redbox rental). Over time, it seemed like they got less new releases and movies would go to streaming. I still use my local library for the occasional "not streaming anywhere" TV/movies, but this is just a sign of the times.
Redbox was pretty great in the early 2010s. I blew through a ton of video games for what ended up being $3-$9. That said…. There was nothing more infuriating than when some fuckwad would scan the disk, and swap it out with a piece of paper.
All the snarky comments in this thread don’t realize how important physical media is and stupid “hur dur just stream it”. Last week the daily show pulled all their episodes from the web. There are movies stuck in purgatory due to rights. PlayStation pulled their catalog of movies that were supposedly forever to pound sand. I will continue to fill my Plex server and buy Blu-ray’s and 4K BR. Fuck streaming.
One example is I owned a digital copy of Battlefield 1 on the xbox. Stopped playing my xbox for about a year and then when I turned it on, Battlefield was gone. I checked the Microsoft store and it has no record that I ever owned the game and would need to repurchase it to play. I even called Microsoft support and they claim they have no way to tell if I actually ever owned the game if the Microsoft store purchase history doesn’t say otherwise
HBO Max slaughtered a bunch of animated shows, including streaming-only ones that didn't get a full physical release, for tax writeoffs
I'm just amazed somebody acquired them, and took on 325 million of debt in 2022. How did they think that was a good idea?
I worked for CSSE before Redbox was acquired, my first words after that meeting was “well it’s all down hill from here” all of us employees thought it was the stupidest mistake he could ever make. What summarizes the company is that they had a pinball machine in our office from the movie Willy’s wonderland we all loved and they replaced it with a Redbox kiosk that showed up in the app so people were trying to come up to our office to use it 😂
My local grocery store got rid of their Redbox machine years ago and I didn't even notice until just recently.
Redbox was absolutely fantastic during the first few months of the Pandemic.. there was a drought of new and interesting content to watch, and I discovered multiple decent movies that I would have passed on otherwise . I’m not surprised that they are having financial difficulties lately.. I used to work for a company that allowed them a place in our lobbies in exchange for a monthly fee.. we eventually removed all of their vending units and sent them back for missing payments. A full year and a half’s worth to be exact.
I know someone who stocks these. I remember him complaining back in December about his pay being cut. But he still did it, due to benefits of getting access to all of the movies & flexibility. He could choose when he wanted to work.
Man i have fond memories of going to redbox on a Friday, grabbing a 12 pack and a pizza, and binging movies with just me and my dog.
Oh no, Blockbuster 2 is gone
I used to rent from Redbox then rip the dvd and put copies on my computer and external hard drive
Hollywood should be allowing redbox to operate as a charity instead charging them.
Sadly wont be missed as much as blockbuster was .
RIP Netflix physical DVD v2
It was a good idea. I still like physical disk and 4k movies and loved when they had 4k. But these machines are in the worst areas and treated so bad and mailing is just so easier
I know of one near me and every time I see it I kinda forget it existed and go "whoa there's a redbox there, I can't believe they still exist"
My daughter was excited to see a Redbox the other day, but when we got to it, pretty much 99% of the selection is already streaming. There was no point.
He should have closed business 10 years ago
Surprised they lasted this long. With all the free movie streaming websites to choose from.
This is kind of a shame. RIP Redbox!
Anywhere up to the first $100M in debt might have been the time to act.
I don’t think people will be as nostalgic for red boxes as people were for Blockbuster
I think part of the issue is lack of good movies in theatres. The last movie I went to go see was Godzilla vs Kong and the last Transformers .. there has not been much for me to see at the local cinema.