On: The largest retailers in the US do not look very healthy

Third paragraph:

> A number of physical retailers have already succumbed to online competition including Circuit City, Borders, CompUSA, Tower Records and Blockbuster

I was curious about the timeline of these closures so I opened all five businesses' Wikipedia pages to find out when each went out of business. (Tower Records - 2006, Circuit City - 2009, Borders - 2011)

It turns out CompUSA[1] and Blockbuster[2] are still operating retail stores! Both are now owned by other companies and CompUSA at least has a substantially reduced number of stores, but you can hardly say something "succumbed" when it still exists. This has me questioning whether I want to bother finishing the article.

[1] http://www.compusa.com/retailstores/compusaStores/index.asp

[2] http://www.blockbuster.com/stores/storelocator

We needn't be pedantic here. These guys are essentially the black knight from Monty Python: "still alive!" but with no arms and legs.

Blockbuster still had profitable locations, IIRC. It was the company as a whole that was collapsing. I assume that those locations are probably still profitable now, though maybe not as much as at its apex.

Blockbuster didn't really get trounced by online sales though, it was more they didn't adapt their business model to account for the convenience and cost savings of services like netflix. Blockbuster is more a victim of poor management than anything else.

How can a brick-and-mortar oriented video rental business compete with Netflix on "convenience"? I can't see any way.

Given that CompUSA was purchased by TigerDirect, it would still qualify as an example that fits the article's narrative of physical retailers succumbing to online retailers.