I can’t think of a business that would take the old Bunnings site? It’s a great location compared to the Master’s site, Bunnings are obviously confident their customers will follow them.
Fitness First. They have converted a few old hardware buildings into gyms in Sydney when they upgraded to bigger sites.
Some big car/truck dealerships
Today’s “sad, but a sign of the times” news comes from the Macarthur region of Sydney’s South West, with the Blockbuster Video store at Mt Annan (apparently the last Blockbuster Video store in Sydney) about to close down after 16 years of business! The Cold Rock Ice Creamery on the same site is also closing down soon:
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/macarthur/last-sydney-blockbuster-store-in-mt-annan-closing-down/news-story/c9bb2f14038d9d44c832e202e16a945a
Hopefully Mt Annanians will take the opportunity to get a video and the ice cream to go along with it on a Friday or Saturday night like people did back in the '90s while they still have the chance.
The Hoyts and Video Ezy self-serve vending machines are still doing ok. There are two Hoyts in my local shops and sometimes there is a queue at both late on Friday and Saturday afternoons.
When I was 14 it was my ambition in life to own a video store so I could sit behind the counter all day and watch movies. That or own a newsagency so I could read all the magazines and newspapers for free. Glad I managed to become a little more ambitious and broaden my horizons before making the investment.
I’m still a member of the Civic Video store near my mother’s house on the south coast. The membership card in my wallet is so old it has the old six digit format phone number on it. They still send me a text on my birthday to offer a free video rental but I haven’t been in the store for about five years.
More like a sign of past times. We haven’t had a video store in any of the nearby suburbs in the last 5-7 years.
I remember when new VHS releases were $80-$100, and ex-rentals weren’t much cheaper. (Though I also remember the U-matic video cassettes they used in the school library to record the ABC-TV schools programs!)
It used to be a treat to go to the AV Room at school and watch an episode of For the Juniors
My local Blockbuster closed last year and was replaced by a chemist, who kindly decided to buy a Blockbuster DVD vending machine.
News in our local paper the other day that another Video City store had closed in Tasmania. Now they’re down to 4 stores in the chain that was the biggest around the state in the 90’s and 00’s with up to 30 stores around. The store to close the other day was Burnie on the North-West Coast, the Devonport one closed about 2 years ago although the graffiti on the wall remained for months after they closed capitalising on their “Good times where do you go?” slogan, the graffiti was “Good times, where can we go?”
I reckon there’s only about a dozen video rental stores in Tassie left now, not many at all. Most of the old stores have been converted over the years to Zap Fitness 24 hour gyms.
For anybody who lived or visited Tasmania in the 90’s, they’re bound to have seen this ad on high rotation.
There was a Blockbuster in Geelong that was massive, it moved to a smaller store about 2 years ago and then closed 6 months later. It had actually had a Video Ezy merge into it a few years prior.
The store remains empty.
That’s something that surprised me a lot when I went to the Gold Coast - so many video rental stores still open. Are they going to just keep existing anywhere with a large enough population of retired people?
The Blockbuster at Wynnum is still open. It reduced it size to 1/3 of the original and a couple or restaurants opened on either side.
Wow, that’s a blast from the past! I remember seeing those on basically every ad-break back in the 90s with them sponsoring every movie that aired on commercial TV. Soooo old school lol.
Some of the former VC stores near where I live were turned into pet care stores years ago too.
One Blockbuster left in the Perth metro area (Morley), but I believe another 2 or 3 are open on the outskirts of the city (Rockingham / Mandurah). Not sure about Video Ezy, though there is a Civic Video literally 5mins away from me.
I think at this stage we’re not too long before people start to feel nostalgia for video rental, so I think the last remaining stores will probably stick it out.
Not so bad for me because prefer shopping at Rebel, when in the caps, and their websites basically are the same format (have been for a while now).
Seems sudden considering they’ve opened a bunch of new stores under the Amart brand in the last 6 months.
They’ve been stuffing about with the two brands for a long time though - I remember a lot of Amart locations in Perth got converted to Rebel not long after the buyout in 2011.
I know that there is something wrong with me but…I always think that Amart sells accessories for cars.