It was the end of an era. Saturday marked the last day for in-store rentals at local Blockbuster outlets, after the company announced that it would be shuttering its remaining 300 stores last week. The final rental was made at 11PM Saturday, when this grinning customer rented the incredibly appropriate This Is the End. Blockbuster celebrated by tweeting the following this morning: 
 
 As to how the customer would go about returning the Seth Rogen-James Franco apocalyptic lovefest, that's still unclear. We've reached out to Blockbuster for comment. 
 
 Update 1: Seth Rogen got wind of the news on Twitter and had this to say: 
 
 Update 2: A spokesperson with Dish Network, which owns Blockbuster, informed us that customers who rented movies before the last day for rentals can simply drop their movies off at any Blockbuster drop box location. ||||| And then there was one. Blockbuster Video, once a ubiquitous part of America’s landscape and leisure time, is down to one Oregon location after it was announced today that its two remaining Alaska stores are closing. 
 
 The final Blockbuster video stores in Anchorage and Fairbanks are closing their rental business on Monday, July 16, but will reopen on Tuesday through the end of August to sell-off their inventory. That leaves a lone Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon as the last man standing in a video chain that, at its peak, had more than 9,000 stores, half outside the US, and employed more than 84,000 people worldwide. Blockbuster founder Wayne Huizenga died in March. 
 
 Talk show host John Oliver tried to help the struggling Alaska stores in April, sending a number of Russell Crowe items to one of the two Anchorage stores. Oliver purchased the items from a Crowe divorce auction, including a leather jockstrap Crowe wore in Cinderella Man, a hood from Robin Hood, and a vest from Les Miserables. While the stunt caused a flurry of attention, it was not enough. ||||| We have a real BLAST FROM THE PAST: Conor Knighton has spotted a retail survivor in a surprising place: 
 
 “I can’t tell you how many business cards I’ve given out to people ‘cause they literally do not believe that I’m from Blockbuster,” said Kevin Daymude. He’s the manager of a Blockbuster Video outlet in Anchorage, Alaska. 
 
 The new releases are new, and the candy is fresh, but it feels like a place from another era. 
 
 Daymude has been there for 26 years, since the days of people returning VHS tapes and having to rewind them. “’Be kind, rewind’ -- we had stickers on there!” he laughed. 
 
 CBS News 
 
 Maybe we should rewind for a minute … 
 
 CBS News 
 
 You’ve seen the headlines: Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010; it closed its last 300 stores in 2013. So how is this even possible? 
 
 “For a lot of people, they haven’t seen a Blockbuster store in, maybe, five or six years,” said franchise owner Alan Payne. 
 
 Back when Blockbuster shut down, Payne decided to keep HIS doors open. Today, he owns nine of the last 12 Blockbusters left in the entire country. (There were once over 9,000 worldwide.) 
 
 “At its peak almost half of the families in the entire country were going in a video store every week,” Payne said. 
 
 “I don’t know of any other industries that have gone from nothing, to an integral part of the culture that fast.” 
 
 The first Blockbuster opened in 1985. By 1989, one was opening every 17 hours. 
 
 The stores were racking up millions of dollars of profit in late fees alone. In 1999, actress Rene Russo and a guy dressed up like a giant videotape rang the opening bell for Blockbuster’s IPO. 
 
 But two years earlier, another video rental company was founded: Netflix. Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix in 2000 for $50 million. Today, it’s worth $60 BILLION. 
 
 Payne explains: “Blockbuster was convinced at the time that they could compete with Netflix, and rather than buy them, they wanted to compete with them.” 
 
 But by the time Blockbuster launched its own DVD-by-mail service, it was too little, too late. Netflix and Redbox had already moved customers away from the stores ... and when high-quality streaming video came along, they never had to leave the couch. 
 
 There were once close to 60,000 employees wearing the blue and yellow. Now, Kenai Malay is one of just a handful left at a Blockbuster in Wasila, hometown of Sarah Palin. Here, there’s something you don’t normally see on Netflix: restocking shelves. 
 
 CBS News 
 
 And here, like in the rest of Alaska, Internet is expensive. When you’re getting charged by the gigabyte, the video store can actually offer a better deal. 
 
 And during the cold dark winters, they can be community gathering places. 
 
 “I feel like a lot of the customers just want to come in and feel like they’re someone special,” said Daymude. “They love the customer service, they love the interaction.” 
 
 It’s a chance to get a recommendation from a person instead of from a computer, to stroll instead of scroll. 
 
 “The shopping experience of looking for a movie on a screen versus coming in here and seeing literally 10,000 titles, there’s no comparison,” said Payne. 
 
 At these last few Blockbusters in the last frontier of Alaska, the employees all know how this movie ends; they’re just trying to pause and enjoy it while it lasts. 
 
 
 
 For more info:
– Blockbuster ended in-store rentals for good last Saturday night. So what was the final movie rental ever? Incredibly appropriately, it was Seth Rogen comedy This Is the End, checked out at 11pm in Hawaii, according to a tweet by the company. The question now, notes the Verge, is just how the customer will return the DVD. Blockbuster announced last week that it is shuttering its remaining 300 US stores. Meanwhile, over in the UK and Ireland, there are still 264 Blockbusters, but the company has just gone into administration, the BBC reports.