Rotary Lunch Speaker: Sandi Harding, Blockbuster

Our lunch program speaker will be Sandi Harding, General Manager of the last Blockbuster store on earth.



Sandi is a long time Bend resident, having moved to Central Oregon in 1986. She began her retail career working in the Mountain View Mall in the early 90’s and then went to work for Ken & Debbie Tisher in 2004 at Pacific Video/ Blockbuster.



As the General Manager, Sandi has watched the many changes to the Home Entertainment World. She began during the peak of Blockbuster’s success when they had over 9000 stores and watched as Netflix and other streaming platforms quickly took over and changed the way we rent movies.



Blockbuster quickly declined to just franchise owned locations by January 2014 when we still had 5 locations in Central Oregon. Over the next 4 years, many franchise owners struggled to keep their stores going and began closing locations. In July of 2018 our last Bend location became the lone Blockbuster store in the USA and then in March of 2019 the last global hold-out in Perth Australia closed their doors leaving this as the Last Blockbuster in the World!



This locally-owned small business suddenly was launched into the international media and was flooded with interviews and visitors from all over the world. They've been on The Ellen Show, The Kelly Clarkson Show, CNN, FOX News, Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News 2x, Inside Edition, and were the final Jeopardy Question in November 2019. They have also been in many national printed publications including the New York Times.



In 2020, they finally saw their store on the big screen when the documentary called the Last Blockbuster was featured in the pop drive thru in downtown Bend.



Join via Zoom here, or can also call in to the meeting at (669) 900-9128 and enter meeting ID: 692 491 9146. If you're asked, the passcode is 5110.