🎬 Sorry, we’re out of business: Thousands of Redbox DVD vending machines are sitting abandoned, and people are grabbing whatever they can. Recent Reddit posts include a person who scooped up 99 movies, another who set up an entire kiosk in their house and a guy who bought eight machines to sell for scrap.
24,000 Redbox machines
Left abandoned across the U.S. CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Dollar General, Albertsons and Kroger all are trying to get permission from Redbox’s bankruptcy court to trash the 890-pound DVD vending machines (paywall link). Hey, maybe you can score one.
Hardware nerds are snapping up old Redbox DVD machines: They’re figuring out how they work and trying to release the movies still inside. But there’s a weird issue — nobody can get the 1996 disaster flick “Twister” out. It’s a problem across all kiosks, with theories ranging from a licensing dispute to a software glitch. What in the hail?
Redbox had a black box: Redbox went out of business, and 24,000 movie kiosks are sitting around. Your name, email address, home address and rental history are likely stored on those internal hard drives, going back a decade. Even worse? Some machines stored the first six and last four digits of credit cards. Hello, we need a factory reset.