Like many of the video stores we used to love, Redbox is done.

Parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment — a subsidiary of Chicken Soup for the Soul LLC but not the company that publishes the books — announced it’s moving from bankruptcy to liquidation as investors will no longer finance the DVD rental business, per The Wall Street Journal.

This is the end for Redbox’s 24k kiosks, streaming services, and 1k+ employees.

Redbox started with McDonald’s…

… in 2002 as a means to drive customers to the fast-food chain, though it’s since been owned by Coinstar, Apollo Global Management, and Chicken Soup. Initially, kiosks sold convenience store products, but it was the DVD biz that took off.

Customers liked the convenience of renting a DVD for a buck, then returning it to any Redbox kiosk.

• By 2007, Redbox had more US locations than Blockbuster.
• In 2013, it accounted for 50% of US DVD rentals.

Unfortunately…

… the advent of streaming services led to a steady decline in not just the DVD rental biz but in physical media in general.

While some advocate for the ownership of physical media as streaming services can randomly yank your fave show, a DVD rental biz doesn’t solve that problem.

And while movie theaters are attempting to combat streaming with immersive screenings and luxury food options, kiosks are rarely experiential.

Redbox tried to launch its own streaming services in an already cluttered market, but continued to lose revenue.

It’s also had several issues…

… since Chicken Soup’s acquisition, per The Verge:

• Lawsuits over missed payments from retailers that hosted kiosks and the company that leased vehicles for Redbox’s technicians.
• It stopped offering new movies to rent.
• It stopped sending out technicians, who brought in revenue by repairing other companies’ kiosks.

Now, Redbox has $1B in debt, and last month, failed to pay employees or continue their benefits, per Deadline.

It’s a frustrating end to a once-promising business that we hope won’t get sadder by all the Redbox kiosks turning into bullet vending machines.

• Real mature: Anti-tourism protesters in Barcelona are squirting tourists with water guns to deter more from coming. A demonstration of ~2.8k protesters, organized by 100+ local groups, filled streets over the weekend to protest mass tourism’s impact on living costs and quality of life in the region. Barcelona, which saw ~26m visitors in 2023, isn’t the only fed-up locale: Venice, Amsterdam, Bali, and Kyoto have all taken steps to curb overtourism.
• A police bust took down a criminal enterprise, seizing many bricks. No, not bricks of cocaine — these were Legos, obviously. Thieves allegedly lifted thousands of new, unopened Lego sets from stores near Eugene, Oregon, then sold them to a local hobby shop. But here’s the rub: police say the store’s owner knew the sets were stolen. The whole crime ring came crashing down with a police raid, during which ~4.2k Lego sets worth $200k+ were recovered.
• Sometimes all it takes for a person to spill their guts is a sneeze — literally. A 63-year-old man was eating at a Florida diner when a forceful sneeze sent “several loops of pink bowel” gushing out of his recent surgical wound, a rare medical complication known as bowel evisceration, per the American Journal of Medical Case Reports. The man, who’d had staples removed from the seemingly healed wound that morning, was celebrating with his wife over breakfast when it happened. And while it cut their meal short, we can’t imagine they were the only people whose breakfast was ruined. (The man survived, BTW.)