I worked at Blockbuster in the company’s final year or so. Corporate had just started requiring us to upsell memberships to Blockbuster Online (RIP). The pitch was that customers could get a movie by mail and then swap it for another in-store. The catch was obvious: every customer we converted was one less renting in the store.

We were told there’d be incentives for each sign-up. I never saw a dime. It felt like even the rewards program had gone bankrupt.

All the way up to 2013 we were running on a point-of-sale system built on DOS. On more than one night I was stuck an hour past closing, on the phone with Blockbuster support, waiting for someone to reboot the system remotely because it froze again.

When I asked my manager why we would steer business away from our own register, he looked at me like I was speaking another language. Months later, when I quit, I told him I thought the company was going under. He laughed and said, “Blockbuster isn’t going anywhere.”

That building has now sat empty for more than a decade, the movie return slot still bolted to the wall. I think about it sometimes. How obvious the cracks were. How few wanted to admit it. And how important it is to trust your instincts when the math doesn’t add up.