M_Sinistrari posted:I worked for Blockbuster for around 10 years lol what did they pay you?
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Aug 29, 2014 22:09
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 17:26 |
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I worked at Blockbuster as my first job when I was in high school and wound up suckered into working there for like 5 years. Yesterday someone at work mentioned renting videos and one of my coworkers started screaming about how Blockbuster was HIS first job and it was the Worst Job In The Universe. It turns out my store was way way worse than his. Mine was held up at gunpoint like... A lot. Theft was pretty nuts, and my first store manager got fired for chasing some dudes that stole PS2 games outside the store. She tried to grab the keys from their car ignition as they got away but they dragged her down the street and gave her tons of road rash for her trouble. Corp HR made her work for an entire week (in severe pain and barely able to move, we dragged the office chair from the back office up front for her) only to fire her and deny all her medical claims. After that no one gave any fucks about theft, I would smile and wave and just shrug and call the cops. Word got out and for a long time we had people coming back with garbage bags just to fill them up with poo poo and then stroll out the door casually because they knew we wouldn't bother doing anything. The cops would then come and yell at me and tell me I needed a gun. gently caress that I made 25 cents above min wage. People would piss in the video return box all the time. A few times someone shoved used condoms in there. My store manager at the time became completely obsessed with finding the culprit and he would stay up at night hiding in the parking lot in his car staking out the drop box. We would drive him crazy by spending most of our shifts shooting rubber bands towards the security cameras until a whole bunch of them were hanging from everything sticking out of the ceiling. He thought customers were doing it somehow. I got interrogated once for 3 hours by the district manager because they thought I stole a rental copy of "Open Water" on DVD. I've still never seen that movie and it turned out they already knew it was someone else. I finally quit when they called me at 4:30 PM and demanded that I work the closing shift for Hurricane Wilma's landfall because the store manager didn't feel like dealing with the crowds or learning the store shut down procedure. I quit on the spot because they had pulled that poo poo a few months earlier for Hurricane Katrina and I had been stuck in the loving store until trees were being downed in the parking lot. I wasn't allowed to lock the doors until we lost power and they kept me there several hours after that point to do stupid poo poo like put plastic over the registers in case the windows broke. I was then expected in the days after to go back and check up on the store myself for all damage, as well as clean out the ice cream cooler and anything else damaged by the loss of power/ flooding/ whatever. People are loving idiots and slam rental places right before storms, pretty much everyone was renting the max of 9 movies right before Katrina (and then spent weeks calling in and demanding refunds because the power went out before all 9 movies could be seen and also the late fees should be waived because blah gently caress YOU.) Anyways, on top of it all a tree fell on my car while I was driving my coworker home who otherwise was stranded because she relied on buses and they were not running. The manager didn't give a gently caress about that either. So in any case I had made it clear that I would not be called for the next storm no matter what, and they did it anyway. I dropped my keys in the drop box and never looked back.
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Aug 29, 2014 22:38
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lol were you still getting minimum wage for all the hurricane stuff? Before I owned an N64 I rented one a couple times from Blockbuster. They never had the Pokemon Snap kiosk. Also my local library has carried games and movies my entire life 
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Aug 29, 2014 23:12
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Yeah by that time I made like 75 cents more than min wage (lol) as a shift leader. Most of my actual raises were min wage laws being updated. My store manager was a lazy gently caress and we had no ASMs so he just made me do everything. For a while the alarm company would call my cell which was great because they'd call a 17 year old at 3 am for a tripped alarm. I was supposed to go to the store and see if it was really being broken in to and then call the cops if it were. The one time I actually went (the first time... every other time I said go gently caress yourselves forever) it took 3 hours for the cops to show up and it turned out it was rats or something. I spent that time cowering in my car hoping no one was going to come out and shoot me (gently caress if I was going in there alone.) Someone once stole the bigass gumball machine by just picking it up, walking out the door and tossing it into the back of their flatbed truck. I thought that was the most genius thing ever. Turns out they never emptied the quarters from the base and corporate estimated they got a few hundred bucks easily if they ever got into it.
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Aug 29, 2014 23:24
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Tristesse posted:Someone once stole the bigass gumball machine by just picking it up, walking out the door and tossing it into the back of their flatbed truck. I thought that was the most genius thing ever. Turns out they never emptied the quarters from the base and corporate estimated they got a few hundred bucks easily if they ever got into it. My store manager, who was a good guy, actually ended up getting shitcanned from something related to the gumball machine. We actually would empty it out & cash it in during inventories, but there was some claim that has never fully been explained to me that was used as an excuse to get rid of him. It involved either the machine not getting emptied frequently enough, or there being a discrepancy in the amount cashed in. I knew the guy for a while and trusted him, and he was one of the more qualified, higher-paid managers during the period where the company was going down the toilet. So yeah, gently caress BB for that alone, aside from all the stuff about it being a lovely retail job. I still talk to the guy once in a while, more than I communicate with most of my former co-workers at least. After that me & the other SL ran the store for a few months on our own, until we got a manager transferred in from another store. He was kind of a weird, moody rear end in a top hat that nobody liked, and there was something...suspicious about him as well. We got a few complaints from customers who said they were charged for the Rewards program even though they didn't want it, weren't asked about it, and weren't even aware of the sale transaction at the time (and it may have even happened when they weren't even in the store.) The transactions were also being rung up by employee IDs for people who weren't actually working at the time. I did further research and it turns out the new manager was selling the unwanted Rewards memberships (using others' employee IDs) to boost his sales numbers and committing credit card fraud simultaneously. I turned his rear end in and Loss Prevention did their thing. I was able to give him my letter of resignation (only coincidentally, I happened to find a less-lovely job at the same time), and a couple of weeks before my last day this dude got fired and I think arrested.
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Aug 30, 2014 00:47
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someone tell me what a manager at BB got paid
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Aug 30, 2014 01:10
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Twat McTwatterson posted:someone tell me what a manager at BB got paid $12/hr
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Aug 30, 2014 01:15
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Whirlwind Jones posted:$12/hr haha gently caress
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Aug 30, 2014 01:24
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That sounds about right for an assistant manager (ASM). I'm pretty sure the SMs got paid quite a bit more. Our District Manager used to have his office in our back room, and on a couple of occasions we got to sneak a peak at his payroll printouts, which listed everybody in the district and what they got paid. I'm pretty sure the SMs got paid in the $40k range, but then again this is going back 10+ years so my memory is a little fuzzy.
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Aug 30, 2014 01:59
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Whirlwind Jones posted:$12/hr 
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Aug 30, 2014 02:58
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lol I remember when Y2K came around literally the only computer that was affected was one at a Blockbuster that thought some guy had a multi-million dollar late fee.
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Aug 30, 2014 03:04
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Rageaholic Monkey posted:lol, ouch
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Aug 30, 2014 03:05
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My times going to Blockbuster as a kid were unremarkable. Around 2006 I was bored and figured I could get a membership of my own and rent some movies. They said that in order to get a membership, I needed not only ID but also a utility bill to prove I really lived where I did. I lived in a college dorm at the time and had proof of address, but obviously not a utility bill, so I was declined. That was the day I got Netflix and never looked back. Around 2011 all the remaining Blockbusters in Georgia were shut down, and I went to the closeout sale at the one closest to my parent's house. They were selling off all their remaining movies and fixtures and had about two weeks to go before they shut down for good. They still had dozens of copies of some documentary about the Republicans running for office in 2008, selling for about 75 cents or so. Even at this incredibly low price no one wanted to buy them. The Blockbuster employee said "We'll probably mark them down to 2 cents really soon, and people still won't buy them." The movies that were previously available for rent were still selling for outrageously high prices.
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Aug 30, 2014 03:48
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We rented Tekken 3 when it came out and returned Tekken 2 instead. No regrets.
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Aug 30, 2014 04:29
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Twat McTwatterson posted:lol Since this was back in the 90s, I don't remember exactly. However I do remember my first raise being a penny. At the time the raises policy was that the store manager would get an allotment and parcel it out according to performance, the store manager I had instead doled out most of it to her friends and the rest of us only got a few cents. I put in for a transfer and by the time I got sent to a new store they revised the policy to something more normal.
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Aug 30, 2014 05:22
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Rageaholic Monkey posted:lol, ouch Being promoted from a peon to assistant manager was 7.25 to a whopping 7.75 
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Aug 30, 2014 05:23
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The video king on the other side of town let me rent 5 movies $5 5 days back in the mid 90's. I think once the movie hit a year or year and a half it fell under that class. I could rent 5 terrible horror movies and watch them all weekend with my friends.
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Aug 30, 2014 05:31
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Wicker Man posted:Being promoted from a peon to assistant manager was 7.25 to a whopping 7.75 i never got why anyone did this. the pay is almost exactly as lovely. the hours are worse. you have to do more poo poo. and the only jobs that will be impressed by you having "assistant manager at a lovely retail outlet" on your resume are other lovely retail outlets that won't pay you enough. i mean unless, god forbid, you're angling for store manager. but then you're obviously hosed in the head
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Aug 30, 2014 05:38
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Whirlwind Jones posted:$12/hr 
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Aug 30, 2014 06:32
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I started at like $6.50 and ended up making around $12 as a manager. This was 2001-ish. It was a slightly better deal because I got bumped up to full time and was eligible for benefits, but yeah it was still a crappy job.
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Aug 30, 2014 06:37
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u know how sometimes ull get a dvd or vhs w/ vaseline peanut butter and cum onit well i was the guy that did that i put my cock in the hole and hosed ift. yw
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Aug 30, 2014 06:38
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gently caress I knew it was you you gross plant monster
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Aug 30, 2014 06:41
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Wicker Man posted:Being promoted from a peon to assistant manager was 7.25 to a whopping 7.75
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Aug 30, 2014 06:49
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ilikedirt posted:u know how sometimes ull get a dvd or vhs w/ vaseline peanut butter and cum onit well i was the guy that did that i put my cock in the hole and hosed ift. yw One time this Mexican dude was dropping off a very late DVD rented by his brother. He opened up the case and it was full of ants, and like some leftover pizza crust or something. 
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Aug 30, 2014 07:36
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This poo poo is depressing. More depressing that big chain stores rip off their workers in just as bad or worse ways still today. I lasted a week as some kind of offshoot of Hollywood Rental. I quit because I got a better job at Circuit City. 
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Aug 30, 2014 07:49
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I worked at a Blockbuster for my first job sometime in the early '00s. Let's see: Two of the managers hated each other. The one who was usually assigned to nights refused to perform closing duties if she knew her rival was opening the next morning. She also got mad at anyone who tried to close properly, just so she could give the opening manager more work. The same person spent most of a shift trying to figure out the store manager's password for the TV up front that just played a Direct TV video ad. Once she cracked it, she switched the channel to a hardcore rap radio station for the rest of the evening. One of my coworkers ate greasy fast food while working the register, and he always showed up sweating in a uniform shirt that had never been washed. He had a hambeast fiancé that he talked about constantly. He once brought her address up on his computer, and then went on break. I kept working at my register, and he came storming out from the employee room asking why I was looking up info on his fiancé. He was getting belligerent, and I had no idea what he was talking about. Turns out he was watching the surveillance feed and didn't realize that the monitors back there were reversed from their actual set up in front--so even though I hadn't changed positions, to him it looked like I moved to his register and was reading up on his creature girlfriend. He couldn't understand what had happened when I tried explaining it to him. One time a little kid was running in the store and split his head open when he hit the corner of a video shelf. He sprayed blood everywhere.
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Aug 30, 2014 07:55
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Automatic Slim posted:I lasted a week as some kind of offshoot of Hollywood Rental. I quit because I got a better job at Circuit City. This pair of sentences basically describes American Capitalism to a T. But I'm in the same boat, I was fired from a mall portrait studio in 3 weeks, and now I make in 1 day what I used to make in 2 weeks.
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Aug 30, 2014 08:59
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I always found a little bit of sadistic pleasure in dealing with the customers that returned an empty case (but swore they returned the movie with it!) Maybe 1/10 would just own up and say they'll go look for it around their house some more. They always found it eventually.
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Aug 30, 2014 09:00
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Sanctum posted:I always found a little bit of sadistic pleasure in dealing with the customers that returned an empty case (but swore they returned the movie with it!) Maybe 1/10 would just own up and say they'll go look for it around their house some more. They always found it eventually. My co-workers were particularly good at checking-in movies that had either the wrong discs or no discs inside. As someone who notices tiny details like those this infuriated me that my co-workers were so inept. This, being my first job, gave me an introduction to the real world. 
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Aug 30, 2014 21:55
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I had a buddy in high school who worked at Blockbuster. One of our mutual friends, Bill, was constantly being cheated on by his girlfriend. She'd come in holding hands with other dudes and when they left he'd call the boyfriend and say, "Hey dude, your girlfriend is cheating on you." He just wouldn't believe it. After this happened a few more times he'd call Bill during the transaction and say, "Hey Bill, your girlfriend is here with, what's your name? Steve. Say hi to Steve, Bill." He still didn't believe it. Blockbuster friend would also call stores for us while we were chilling out and say, "Hey this is store 0478, soandso paid off their late fee here so can you remove it from your system? Great, thanks."
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Aug 30, 2014 23:13
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The Malthusian posted:Direct TV Oh man, I remember that garbage. Yeah, people would come in to rent movies and we would have to try to sell them a loving satellite dish instead.
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Aug 31, 2014 15:35
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Tristesse posted:Rotten retail poo poo plus hurricanes Where was this? Deep suburbia, a low-income area? The brazen thefts make it sound pretty rough.
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Sep 1, 2014 05:39
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a friend and i rented a n64 and killer instinct and had a super cool weekend once. thanks blockbuster
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Sep 1, 2014 06:56
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My friend worked there in high school and almost got killed. Some crazy old woman racked up like $100 worth of late fees, freaked out, and drove her van through the front of the store trying to kill him. Blockbuster made him sign some bullshit about how he couldn't talk about it for a year cause of the trail so we never knew why he just quit one day. He said it was like a bomb went off, poo poo went flying everywhere, and when he turned around half of her van was in the drop box. I'm pretty sure she just got probation or something easy.
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Sep 1, 2014 07:41
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I miss blockbuster. Netflix and Redbox will never carry Princess Bride and Breakfast Club continuously or simultaneously. Not to mention the fun of running through the aisles searching for the greatest samurai movie ever made... RIP. BB
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Sep 1, 2014 08:16
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the most bizarre product placement scene in history took place on that hallowed ground https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YHMYkUrV7A if you're doubting your own senses, yes, that is Ethan Hawke wearing a knit hat while playing Hamlet and delivering the most famous soliloquy in history while renting a VHS from blockbuster cis white male fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Sep 1, 2014 |
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Sep 1, 2014 08:21
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Yomofo posted:My friend worked there in high school and almost got killed. Some crazy old woman racked up like $100 worth of late fees, freaked out, and drove her van through the front of the store trying to kill him. Blockbuster made him sign some bullshit about how he couldn't talk about it for a year cause of the trail so we never knew why he just quit one day. He said it was like a bomb went off, poo poo went flying everywhere, and when he turned around half of her van was in the drop box. I'm pretty sure she just got probation or something easy. But wouldnt it cost more money to repair your car than just pay the drat late fees?
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Sep 1, 2014 19:23
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revenge is more important than money
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Sep 1, 2014 19:28
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Skeleton Ape posted:Oh man, I remember that garbage. Yeah, people would come in to rent movies and we would have to try to sell them a loving satellite dish instead. Thankfully I got in on the tail end of that poo poo. I never had to sell any of that, and nobody ever asked to subscribe. The one memory I have of it is watching the Cubs choke vs. the Marlins in 2003. I_ma_gine posted:Not to mention the fun of running through the aisles searching for the greatest samurai movie ever made... Which one of these is the greatest?  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325710/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130236/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_6 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106258/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_19 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165798/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_10 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118736/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_40 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2275711/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_136 Gutcruncher posted:But wouldnt it cost more money to repair your car than just pay the drat late fees? You missed the "crazy" part.
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Sep 1, 2014 19:39
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 17:26 |
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Blockbuster was headquartered down the street from me and my neighborhood store was their concept store when they were going out of business, it was pretty funny before they declared bankruptcy and their landlord told them to GTFO and refused to renew their lease they decided that they were going to survive by becoming an even more retarded version of RadioShack so the store by me tried to sell iPods and digital cameras and flatscreen TVs.
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Sep 1, 2014 19:41
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