{"id":1510,"date":"2013-11-07T09:15:46","date_gmt":"2013-11-07T13:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=1510"},"modified":"2013-11-07T12:46:34","modified_gmt":"2013-11-07T16:46:34","slug":"thursday-7-november-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2013\/11\/07\/thursday-7-november-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, 7 November 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

08:15 –<\/span> The end of an era. Blockbuster Video, which a decade ago had about 9,000 stores, announced yesterday that it’s closing its distribution centers and its 300 remaining stores. The Onion sums it up<\/a>.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s not often, even in retrospect, that one can point to a single small error that will kill a business. But in Blockbuster’s case it’s possible to point out just such an error. In the late 90’s, a Blockbuster customer returned a video late and was charged a $40 late fee. That pissed him off. His name is Reed Hastings, and instead of just stewing about it he went out and founded Netflix. Which killed Blockbuster.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

11:45 –<\/span> I’ve spent the morning issuing purchase orders and buying stuff. I ordered some stuff from Amazon, and they asked me if I wanted to sign up for a 30-day free trial of Prime. I’d done that before and let it drop before the 30 days expired. I did it that time mainly to try Amazon Prime Video, which turned out to be a PITA compared to Netflix. Incredibly, Amazon has no queue. You have to search for each video you want to watch and start it playing manually. I thought that first Prime trial was a one-time only thing, but about six months ago Amazon started offering me a second chance. So today I decided to sign up again. This time, I’ll just keep it and pay them their $79\/year. We’ll probably watch some videos on Prime–stuff Netflix doesn’t have yet–and the free 2-day no-minimum order shipping is a minor plus. Also, Barbara sometimes wants a Kindle book that’s priced outrageously. With Prime, she gets one free book a month.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

08:15 – The end of an era. Blockbuster Video, which a decade ago had about 9,000 stores, announced yesterday that it’s closing its distribution centers and its 300 remaining stores. The Onion sums it up<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

It’s not often, even in retrospect, that one can point to a single small error that will kill a business. But in Blockbuster’s case it’s possible to point out just such an error. In the late 90’s,<\/p>\n

 » Read more about: Thursday, 7 November 2013  »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-netflix","category-news-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}