Dish Network Corp. plans to close approximately 300 Blockbuster stores in the next few weeks and will lay off about 3,000 employees, a Dish spokesman told the Denver Post yesterday.
The closures come on top of the estimated 500 Blockbuster units that parent company Dish shuttered last year.
Following the closure of underperforming locations, Blockbuster will have 500 video-rental stores left in the US.
Yesterday’s announcement by Dish spokesman John Hall did not reveal the locations of the stores that will close in the coming weeks.
It is not known whether any of the Blockbuster units targeted for closure are in the New York metro area.
Englewood, Colo.-based Dish, the nation’s No. 2 satellite-TV provider with about 14 million subscribers, bought Blockbuster out of bankruptcy for $320 million in 2011 — a move that prompted head-scratching at the time.
The once-powerful video-rental chain has faced growing competition from DVD rental and online-streaming service Netflix as well as from RedBox video-rental kiosks operated in supermarkets by Coinstar.
Dish has about 30,000 employees nationwide.
Despite the plans to close stores, Dish “continues to see value in the Blockbuster brand and we continue to analyze the store-level profitability as we have in the past,” Hall told the Denver Post.
Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen is awaiting government approval to build a fourth-generation mobile broadband network.
Earlier this month, Dish started a bidding war with Sprint by making an offer to acquire wireless broadband provider Clearwire.
Dish has offered to purchase Clearwire for $3.30 a share, an 11 percent premium over Sprint’s December $2.97-a-share offer.
Dish’s bid values Clearwire at roughly $5 billion.