Photo Post – Blockbuster Hit By Blackout

A Blockbuster Video hit by a power outage. A generator provides a modicum of light in the store while employees try to keep customers out. At bottom left, an employee plays with her cellphone, waiting for the power to come back on. The whole block was left without power.

“Some people change their ways when they see the light; others when they feel the heat.” —Caroline Shoeder

Last week there were over 50,000 power outages in one day in Argentina. The blackouts are estimated to have affected around 1,000,000 people. They came after a huge increase in the use of air conditioners – due to a stifling heatwave – put excessive strain on Argentina’s dilapidated power system.

It should come as little surprise, then, that Tuesday, as temperatures soared again and people turned up their air conditioners, the electrical grid failed again, resulting in another round of blackouts. The photo here shows a Blockbuster Video branch in Nuñez which, at the time this picture was taken, had been without electricity for around two hours.

“Sir, the store is closed. You have to leave,” a security guard told me as I tried to enter the store. “We have no power. You can’t rent or buy anything. Please leave.”

The store manager said this particular branch has been hit by at least one blackout every week since the beginning of the summer. “I can’t rent anything to anyone now,” the manager said. “We have no electricity, so we can’t take credit cards. We can’t operate the cash registers. Nor can we use the computers. There’s no way to keep track of what we rent. We could try to write everything down by hand, but that would become extremely messy. The sodas in the fridge are getting warm, and the Häagen-Dazs (ice cream) is melting. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

To make things worse:

“Tuesday is our weekly promotion day. Movies are just $3.49. We have more customers today than we normally do. So that makes all of this even worse. The clients are unhappy. They come across town to rent a movie and we can’t allow them to rent anything. They get frustrated and complain. What’s worse is that we can’t close the store down because the doors are on electronic rollers. We can’t even move them unless we’ve got power. So I could be here all night guarding the store if we don’t get the power back on. There’s no way to know how long these blackouts are going to last when they hit us.”

Ironically, one of Blockbuster’s competitors, an independently-owned DVD rental shop located just down the street, was open to the public despite the blackout. The store, which rents mainly pirated DVDs (many of which have yet to be released even in the U.S.), lacks the technical sophistication of a well-funded international company like Blockbuster. And while the store has a computer, it depends much less on it for business. In this case the lack of technology, and the need to depend on it, was actually a boon to business, allowing the “trucho” DVD store to stay open while its powerful publicly-traded competitor had to close its doors to the public, even if only metaphorically.