For roughly two decades, Blockbuster Video was the physical front door to American home entertainment. The blue-and-yellow ticket-stub logo marked the place where a Friday-night decision got made, where the new releases lived behind a wall of identical VHS spines, and where you eventually learned the going rate for forgetting to return a tape. At its height the chain ran more than 9,000 stores and employed in excess of 84,000 people, a retail footprint that made it feel less like a company than like infrastructure.
The business was elegantly simple and quietly punitive. Blockbuster rented you a movie for a few days; if you kept it longer, you paid a late fee, and those late fees became one of the most reliable profit streams in the company. That dependence on a charge customers resented would later prove to be a structural weakness, because the first competitor to remove the penalty did not merely undercut Blockbuster on price — it attacked the thing Blockbuster had been quietly monetizing all along.
That competitor was Netflix, a mail-order DVD startup that, by the account of its founders, offered to sell itself to Blockbuster around 2000 for roughly $50 million and was turned away. Blockbuster’s executives saw a niche operation with no stores; what they were actually looking at was the company that would invert the entire model, first by mailing discs with no due dates and then by streaming the movies directly into living rooms.
Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2010, was carved up and sold to Dish Network in 2011, and saw its last company-owned stores shuttered by 2014. A single franchised location in Bend, Oregon outlived the chain that spawned it, surviving today as a nostalgia destination and the subject of a 2020 documentary — the last lit window of a retail empire.
The MiniDisc was Sony’s magneto-optical recording format, a small disc housed in a protective plastic caddy, announced in September 1992 and on sale in Japan that November. Sony positioned it as the modern successor to the compact cassette: recordable like a tape, but skip-resistant, instantly navigable, and editable in ways tape could never manage. You could record, name your tracks, split and combine them, and reorder a whole disc with a few button presses.
Underpinning it was ATRAC, Sony’s proprietary audio compression, which let a disc smaller than a CD hold a comparable amount of music. That engineering was genuinely clever, and in Japan the MiniDisc became a mainstream consumer format through the late 1990s, popular with commuters, students, and musicians who valued its recording and editing abilities. Tapers and field recordists prized it too.
Outside Japan the format never broke through. It arrived caught between the entrenched CD and, soon, the cheap recordable CD-R, and it carried a premium price for discs and hardware. Sony’s insistence on its own ATRAC ecosystem, and its long resistance to the open MP3 standard, kept the format walled off just as digital music was about to explode.
The MP3 player, and above all Apple’s iPod in 2001 paired with iTunes, made compressed music on a physical disc look instantly obsolete. Flash memory did the rest. Sony tried to extend the format with Hi-MD in 2004, but the trend was irreversible. The company stopped shipping MiniDisc players in 2013, ending the format’s commercial life while leaving a devoted collector following behind.
Google Glass was an optical head-mounted display built by Google X, the company’s experimental “moonshot” lab, and championed personally by co-founder Sergey Brin. The hardware was genuinely novel for its moment: a featherweight titanium frame carrying a small prism display that floated a translucent screen above the wearer’s right eye, a forward-facing camera, a touch-sensitive temple, bone-conduction audio, and a voice interface activated by the phrase “OK Glass.” The pitch was that the smartphone could finally come off your palm and onto your face, freeing your hands and your attention.
Google unveiled the device with one of the most theatrical product demos in tech history. At the Google I/O developer conference on June 27, 2012, skydivers wearing Glass jumped from a blimp over San Francisco and streamed the descent live to the audience while Brin narrated from the stage. The marketing that followed was equally aggressive about positioning Glass as fashion as much as gadget, culminating in a twelve-page spread in Vogue’s September 2013 issue.
The reality on the ground was harsher. From 2013, Google sold a beta “Explorer” edition to developers and curious early adopters for $1,500, and the public quickly decided that a person wearing an always-available, hard-to-detect camera on their face was a problem rather than a marvel. Bars, restaurants, cinemas, and casinos banned the device; the wearers earned the durable slur “Glasshole.” Combined with a stiff price, weak battery life, thin everyday utility, and visible social discomfort, the backlash was fatal to the consumer dream.
Google ended the consumer Explorer program in January 2015, then quietly repurposed the technology as Glass Enterprise Edition for factories, warehouses, and clinical settings (2017, with EE2 in 2019). That pivot kept Glass alive for years as a niche industrial tool until Google discontinued it entirely on March 15, 2023. Glass became the canonical cautionary tale of “face computing” and a reference point against which every later AR and smart-glasses effort would be measured.
Toys “R” Us was the original “category killer,” the big-box toy superstore that taught a generation of American retail how to dominate a single product category and drive smaller competitors out of business. It grew from a baby-furniture shop Charles Lazarus opened in Washington, D.C. in 1948 into a chain whose backwards “R,” giraffe mascot Geoffrey, and jingle “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid” were fixtures of American childhood. By the 1980s and 1990s it was the undisputed leader of U.S. toy retail.
The company’s downfall was not really a failure to sell toys; it was a balance sheet. A 2005 leveraged buyout by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital, and Vornado Realty Trust, completed July 21, 2005 for roughly $6.6 billion, saddled the retailer with about $5 billion in debt. For more than a decade, the interest payments on that debt consumed the cash the company needed to modernize its stores and build a credible online business.
While Toys “R” Us serviced its debt, the competitive ground shifted underneath it. Amazon, Walmart, and Target used toys as loss leaders and out-executed it online, a vulnerability foreshadowed by a disastrous exclusive Amazon deal struck in 2000 that ended in litigation. Starved of capital and outflanked on price and convenience, the chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 18, 2017.
A weak 2017 holiday season ended any hope of restructuring. In March 2018 the company announced it would liquidate its U.S. business, closing roughly 735 stores and eliminating more than 30,000 jobs, with the last U.S. stores shutting by the end of June 2018. The brand did not vanish entirely: now owned by WHP Global, Toys “R” Us returned through Macy’s store-in-store shops beginning in 2022 and airport and other outlets, while many international stores never closed. Its status is best described as defunct in its original form, with a partial revival.