Scale and Scope in the Digital Economy
On March 19, 2019, the APNews published a story about the last remaining species of its kind in Oregon. But it is not a biological species going extinct. Oregon’s Blockbuster retail store became the last on Earth when the only other store in Perth, Australia closed its doors on March 31, 2019.1
The store systems and operation are so archaic that one wonders how it could function:
The computer system must be rebooted using floppy disks that only the general manager … knows how to use. The dot-matrix printer broke, so employees write out membership cards by hand. And the store’s business transactions are backed up on a reel-to-reel tape that can’t be replaced because Radio Shack went out of business. ...
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