Keyes hopes to make Blockbuster stores smaller on average, too, and to customize titles at each store based on rental patterns, much the way he said a 7-Eleven in one neighborhood might have stocked more Corona and another across town stocked more Coors Lite.Ī keen believer in crunching data, Mr.

“But we ended up generating more sales from a store that was literally half the size.” Keyes said in a telephone interview from Blockbuster’s headquarters in Dallas. “The trend in the convenience-store world was we were building larger and larger stores, but the bigger they were, the less convenient they were,” Mr. Keyes just took the top post at Blockbuster this month and has yet to articulate a full strategy, he said in an interview that a few of his tried-and-true strategies might work well at the video rental chain: tailoring the product line to each store, relying heavily on data and automation, and reducing the size of the retail footprint. The previous chief executive, John Antioco, resigned after a protracted dispute with the board over salary.Īlthough Mr. In 1990, the company was in bankruptcy in 2004, his last full year at the helm, it posted a profit of $106 million.īlockbuster, by contrast, has posted losses in 9 of the last 10 years, has closed hundreds of stores, and has had customers siphoned off by Netflix.

Keyes, 52, left 7-Eleven three years ago, he had overseen 36 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. While competitors were still letting distributors choose which beer and potato chip varieties they should stock, he moved to an automated system that made such decisions internally and store-by-store. Keyes, the former chief executive of 7-Eleven - could perhaps be described as a master of rewrite.Īt 7-Eleven, he built smaller stores at a time when other chains were building bigger ones. If Blockbuster is a company in desperate need of a script doctor, the man it has chosen for the task - James W.

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