Dallas Retail Jobs with Blockbuster Cut

One major movie rental store is cutting Dallas retail jobs.

Blockbuster Inc. recently announced that it will cut an unspecified number of jobs, including several executive positions, in an effort to reorganize the company's Dallas-based corporate staff.

Company spokeswoman Michelle Metzger told The Dallas Morning News that Blockbuster completed a realignment of resources at its corporate headquarters and distribution center in McKinney last week.

Blockbuster, which is the largest movie rental chain in the United States, laid off a "small fraction of its 3,000 employees in Dallas-Fort Worth" in an effort to continue optimizing resources.

As of late, the company has been closing some stores and adding kiosks through a joint venture with NCR Corporation, but has been losing market share to Netflix and Redbox.

"Consumers are finally embracing digital downloads as more television shows are made available for free on the Internet and new televisions, DVRs and video game players are equipped to receive movie downloads," The Dallas Morning News notes. "Blockbuster is participating in all those new formats, too, but it has more competition in the digital world."

One positive for Blockbuster - its largest competitor, Movie Gallery Inc., recently filed for bankruptcy for the second time since 2007. The company, which owns Hollywood Video, plans to close 805 stores, or about one-third of its total.

During December 2009, the Dallas-Plano-Irving area's unemployment rate increased from 7.9 percent to 8 percent, following a decrease from 8.3 percent during November. Despite the increase, the area's rate was still lower than the national unemployment rate at the time of 10 percent, although that rate has now decreased to 9.7 percent.

The Dallas area had a total non-farm employment of 2,077,500 workers during December, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is up from 2,071,800 workers during November, but a 2 percent decrease from December 2008.