An advertising Blockbuster.

Usually I leave the office around eight-ish, hop into a cab and try to make it home in time to spend a minute or two with my crippled twins, Tiny Tim and Tiny Tina, before they have to go to bed.

As I cab uptown I pass a former Blockbuster Video store here, and a former one there, with soaped windows, neon gone, closed forever. Yet another example of a business that dies because it has failed to keep up with the times. (I am talking only about their bricks and mortar business in NYC; I know nothing about their online services. But that's beside the point.)

My point is this. The world has passed Blockbuster by. People do not consume movies anymore the way Blockbuster rents or sells them. It doesn't matter how they stock, how they price, who they employ. Imagine a deli that specializes in tongue. No one eats tongue anymore. It ain't gonna last.

Of course, this brings me to traditional ad agencies. Pumping out TV spots and hoping the rotation of the Earth reverses and we wake up back in 1982. Yes, there is still a need for TV spots. But there are probably too many bricks and mortar outlets selling them. Some of them will perish.

Ozymandias
--Percy B. Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.