I shed no similar tears for Blockbuster, which declared bankruptcy on Thursday. The giant video chain never gave me a reason to like it, much less love it, for reasons that are too familiar to reiterate here. And I’m fully aware that consumer choice in the age of Netflix and on-demand video and rental kiosks is hardly limited by the demise of any video store or chain. But the empty shell of the store that was formerly Reel Video, with its blank windows gaping onto Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue, is a reminder, as bankruptcy lawyer Stephen Lubben points out in today’s New York Times, that there are larger economic implications to the collapse of the video store rental model.

…[T]his represents yet another hit to the commercial real estate market. Although Blockbuster has yet to make clear its plans with regard to store closings, one of the crucial benefits of Chapter 11, as contrasted with an out-of-court restructuring, is the ability to terminate leases and cap the damages owed to landlords because of the termination. For a market already hit by several prior Chapter 11 cases — how many of you live near an empty Hollywood Video or Linens ‘n Things stores? — the closure of underperforming Blockbuster stores will mean even more empty stores fighting for tenants.

In a press release, Blockbuster claims that all 3,000 of its currently operating stores will remain open. But that’s hardly reassuring, considering that at the beginning of 2010, Blockbuster boasted 3,500 stores and two years ago more than 4,000. The company is in a tailspin and the bankruptcy restructuring seems likely to do little more than slow down the pace of its collapse.

At MarketWatch, Jon Friedman tells us that Blockbuster offers a a big cautionary tale to American businesses.

Remember, it wasn’t quite so long ago that Blockbuster symbolized the future of commerce — employing technology to make consumers’ lives easier and more convenient.

But not convenient enough for the Netflix generation!

These days, it’s all about convenience when it comes to giving the people what they want. They want convenience, pure and simple. Sure, in these hard times, we all want to find bargains as well. But mostly, it’s about finding a reason not to drive to the mall.

It is amusing, and instructive, I think, to contrast Friedman’s ode to the convenience-loving American with a Christian Science Monitor story reporting on how independent video stores that specialize and provide great service are thriving while the big chains crash.

Because people don’t just want convenience. They also want soul. Reel Video had so much soul that I looked forward to getting off my couch and making the (short) trek to the obsolete “brick-and-mortar” building. Blockbuster’s sin was that it had no soul and competitors that were more convenient. The question that bothers me is whether there’s enough soul out there in the general economy to fill all the empty spaces that Blockbuster and every other big chain disintermediated by new technology are bound to leave gaping in the malls and downtowns of the United States.

Which is sort of the problem for Crocs Inc. now. Reports about the company’s future look bleak — it lost $185.1 million last year, shed 2,000 jobs, and revenue in the first quarter of 2009 declined by 32 percent. And yes, you read that right — they had grown so big so quickly that they laid off 2,000 people. Just three years ago, Crocs went public in a splashy stock offering, raising $200 million; now it trades at about three bucks a share, down from a high of nearly $70 in October 2007. Analysts wonder whether a scheduled September debt payment will do the firm in.

Crocs appears to have been a classic victim of its own success. Founded by some friends who somehow got their hands on a new Canadian technology to make lightweight, bacteria-resistant foam, the company launched in 2002, aimed at boaters, who might need waterproof footwear. Things started slowly enough. They sold to people who liked them more for their comfort and support — cooks, nurses, waiters, anyone who needed to be on their feet for a long time.

But three years ago, they somehow just caught fire, spreading from the heartland to the coasts in a reversal of the usual trend path. New York chef/erstwhile Food Network star Mario Batali endorsed them without reservations, buying dozens of pairs; he would go on to be such an effective evangelist that the company launched a special Batali line. Polk’s store started selling as many as 5,000 a month, between the bricks-and-mortar locations and the Web site. By the summer of 2006, Crocs were everywhere. “You’ve tried to ignore them, but they’ve spread like vermin,” the Washington Post’s Style section sneered in an Aug. 1, 2006, piece on the trend. Crocs didn’t just roll with the boom, it pushed it along — the company took out ads in Vanity Fair, with the tag line “Ugly can be beautiful.”

That ad campaign gets to the heart of why the rise, let alone the fall, of Crocs was such a mystery. The shoes are ugly. You know they’re ugly. People knew they were ugly even as they flocked to buy them; they celebrated, they reveled in their ugliness. They created a whole tacky subculture around them, sticking little plastic charms — known as “Jibbitz” — in the holes that dot the tops of the shoes. You could decorate your shoes with hamburgers or sharks, and for some strange reason, people actually did. The shoes sold by the millions. By 2007, even George W. Bush was tromping around in the things.

And Crocs, like any good business, expanded its operations to meet demand. It bought the company that made the Jibbitz, in a vertical integration move straight out of Andrew Carnegie’s playbook. It ramped up production, building factories in Canada and Mexico to churn out more and more of the shoes. It set up distribution centers in Japan and Holland to help shovel the things out to a global audience. It tried to launch a line of clothes, made out of the same synthetic material it used to make the shoes.

But the material, it turned out, was part of the problem. With the exception of a few well-publicized incidents where the shoes got caught in escalators, Crocs, it seemed, were virtually indestructible. Which meant no one ever had to buy replacement pairs. Perhaps no one at Crocs HQ had heard the term “planned obsolescence,”  or seen the movie “The Man in the White Suit.” At some point, the company saturated its market and suddenly … everyone who ever had any intention of owning a pair of Crocs, did. And sales came crashing down. The recession, when it began last year, was the final blow.

Now, in the summer of 2009, just three years after Crocs rocketed up, it’s hard to find a pair on anyone over the age of 10. Wandering around the Mall, the White House and the Capitol over the last week, I saw plenty of tourists strolling in flip-flops, sneakers, business shoes — and only a handful of Crocs. A few years ago, it would have been impossible to walk a block through downtown without spotting them in some garish color.

“So many things happened to have their growth be on such an unrealistic path that when the economy pulled back, they had just figured out how to make more — and they needed less,” Polk said. “You couldn’t sustain that fairy dust thing. There’s just no reason why such a large percentage of the families in America needed to have half a dozen pairs under their kids’ beds.” (Incidentally, while Polk is still selling shoes, he’s no longer on Boulder’s City Council. He served one term, thanks to his Croc-walking campaign, but didn’t seek reelection after he was arrested for marijuana possession in 2006.)

Now in its death throes, Crocs has turned to more and more exotic styles. There’s the Santa Cruz, vaguely modeled on classic espadrilles  – a pair of which, in full disclosure, I must cop to owning. There are boots, known as the Nadia. There are models with high heels, and golf shoes. There is even a whole run of Crocs lined with fur, known as the Mammoth, which Salon’s Rebecca Traister sheepishly admitted to purchasing for her boyfriend.

But if Crocs is to survive its debt burden, it may have to retrench, getting back to basics and its core market — the chefs, the nurses and the others who bought the shoes in the early days, as well as kids, who retailers say like the shoes because they don’t need help tying them. The new CEO, John Duerden, has indicated as much, saying the company knows there’s still a market out there for its products and is taking steps to slim down to make sure Crocs can serve it. When pressed, though, he’s also defended the recent diversification. “We currently have more than 120 styles of casual, comfortable footwear, including sandals, boots, heels, wedges, flats and functional footwear for people who work on their feet or who have foot or back problems, along with our signature clogs,” Duerden wrote in a snippy post on the company’s blog after the Washington Post reported on its financial problems.

Regardless, the Crocs Inc. we all knew and loved — or hated — a few years ago seems to be a thing of the past. Either the classic Crocs shoes will be sold, quietly, to niche markets, or the company will turn itself into just another anonymous manufacturer of cheap, more or less well-made footwear that looks indistinguishable from anything else on anyone’s feet. And all those brightly colored, indestructible marvels will, one day, clog up our landfills. And future archaeologists will find them and say, “Wow. These are some ugly shoes.” 

Of course, when we’re talking about BBQ Pork Ravioli Bites, preparation may be beside the point. Friday’s and its ilk trade in the kind of middlebrow mall fare and managed smiles so ably parodied in the movie “Office Space.” These chains elicit not the loathing of a Blockbuster, but a head-shaking chuckle, and the self-loathing of indulging in caloric disasters like the Awesome Blossom.

Still, it’s been a rough couple of years for Friday’s. Though it is a private company, and data is closely held, it’s known that locations across the country have closed. The Friday’s in New York’s financial district shut down for only a few days, but that was because a bartender was allegedly selling cocaine. In 2008, because of an intra-family feud, Carlson Companies, the family-run firm that owns the Friday’s brand (and about half of all the individual Friday’s outlets), had to hire a CEO who was not a Carlson for the first time. And a customer found a snake’s head in his broccoli.

But the most telling sign of Friday’s struggles has been its lack of cohesive corporate strategy. In addition to the (alarmingly titled) Give Me More Stripes rewards program, the chain has cooked up the following promotions in 2009: 10 Meals for $9.99; Buy One Lunch, Get One Free; Five Cent Appetizers; and the World’s Largest Inauguration Party. For the month of May, Friday’s unveiled its most desperate promotion yet — it would offer all 16 full-portion sandwiches and salads for $5, its lowest price since the first Friday’s opened in 1965. Friday’s isn’t looking for a strategy, it’s looking for a savior.

In the restaurant business, though, who isn’t? As USA Today reported last month, restaurant sales have declined for 10 straight months, and customer traffic for 19 straight months. Now, a new study making waves within the industry suggests that four out of 10 chains could fold within the next year due to massive debt and rising commodity and energy prices.

While many companies are facing these problems, it’s even worse for Friday’s and other “casual dining” chains. The classic definition of casual dining includes sit-down service, alcohol, almost mythical portion sizes, and a check between $10 and $25 per person — and you can see part of the problem right there. The most obvious reason for Friday’s struggles is that people need to cut costs, which can mean cooking at home or driving through McDonald’s.

But casual dining’s struggles actually predate the recession. In 2002, the sector did $100 billion in business. By 2008, that number had dropped to $75 billion, and Friday’s fits this pattern. Back in 2003, slumping sales forced the chain into a $200 million “revitalization” campaign, dumping its brown-wood look in favor of sleeker steel and glass. Friday’s finished remodeling just as things began to fall apart. Recently, an analyst at Morgan Stanley predicted that of the nation’s 81,000 casual dining restaurants, at least 1,200 — from any and all chains — will need to close.

When the first Friday’s opened in Manhattan in 1965, at the corner of 63rd and First Avenue, it was a singles bar. In fact, it was the singles bar, according to contemporary press accounts, which made it sound like the set of “Cocktail.” As similar restaurants opened (Chili’s in 1975, Applebee’s in 1980), an oak-paneled genre, heavy on the faux-Tiffany and secretary drinks, was born. Friday’s grew quickly, its red-and-white awnings sprouting in the South, then in the Midwest, hitting 100 restaurants by 1984. By 2006 it had expanded to more than 800 restaurants in almost 60 countries, and become one of “America’s Greatest Brands,” at least according to the American Brands Council.

It had also widened its appeal from singles and siphoned customers away from the fine-dining sector. Unfortunately, so had all the other endlessly replicating casual dining chains, to the point that analysts now complain about how they “lack sufficient differentiation.” Bennigan’s, which keeps trying to die, even if a few franchises won’t quite let it, self-identified as an Irish pub, but it served the same steaks, shrimp and fried, cheesy, quasi-Southwestern appetizers as Friday’s and everyone else. Indeed, if pressed to isolate something exceptional about Friday’s, besides its primacy, the best I could do is Most Shameless. The chain engages in ferocious cross-marketing, pushing “Ultimate” items endorsed by the Food Network or entrees based on the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue. Friday’s was the first chain to partner with the Atkins Diet.

Why did this formula, where the menu and the atmosphere emphasize coverage over quality, work so well once upon a time? I visited a Friday’s last week, in a chain-choked strip of Orange, Conn., to find out. On a Friday night at 7:30, there was no wait. In fact, an entire wing of the restaurant sat empty. The food, to this eater, at least, did not measure up to casual-dining competitors Texas Roadhouse or Ruby Tuesday and its salad bar. (And it looks like Consumer Reports will back me on this in its July restaurant issue.) I tried the Jack Daniels Burger, served with the dark, syrupy-sweet sauce that is the lifeblood of Friday’s menu, and the best I can say is that it was cheap and filling. Thanks to Friday’s latest promotion, “Buy One Entree, Get One Free,” my wife and I ate for $13.15 plus tip.

We made it about six minutes before the first “Birthday Song,” where Friday’s staff marches out to clap and chant for one lucky customer. In the hour we were there, this happened no less than five times, and I think it starts to get at the chain’s appeal. The buzz of conversation, in English and in Spanish, never let up, and there did seem to be a festive atmosphere. Perhaps Friday’s works in the same way as its birthday routine — bland, predictable, but still loud and fun.

There are also practical considerations. Chains like Friday’s draw on singles bars, sports pubs and family dining, and if the model ends up dulling each part, there’s still a convenience in finding them together. Parents can drink without worrying about drunks (and on my visit, a highchair seemed to block every aisle). Large groups can bank on a wide selection that leaves no one rapturous, but no one angry, either. Also, lest we forget, Friday’s is the chain of choice of Kevin Federline — its dress code remains flexible, and I saw nothing above jeans, along with a not insignificant number of sweat pants.

If these are the best defenses casual dining can offer, though, it’s in more trouble than we thought. First, they obviously limit its audience — and, worse, limit it to groups getting killed by the recession. Casual dining has always counted suburban baby boomers and lower-income families as its base. (For example, more than a third of Applebee’s customers earn household incomes of less than $50,000 a year.) There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, except that retirement-scared boomers and lower-income workers have been the first to cut back on spending.

To be fair, these two groups include a whole lot of Americans. But as recently as 2007, Friday’s and its culinary brethren were actually focused on upgrading their clientele — remodeling restaurants, adding more expensive food, even phasing out coupons and promotions. And this brings us to the second, long-term problem with Friday’s formula. Even if Friday’s had better demographics, even if it didn’t have to worry about the death of malls and the birth of “fast-casual” places like Panera and Chipotle — no waiters, a cut above fast food — the chain has diversified itself into a corner. And it doesn’t have a clue where to go next.

Casual-dining execs talk about innovation, evolution and, yes, a few failures; they parrot the rhetoric of “never letting a serious crisis go to waste.” But, honestly, what can they change? Thanks to their all-inclusive nature, they can’t expand the menu or the experience. They certainly can’t increase the kitsch. So Friday’s only option is to offer last-ditch discounts, where it sells a $12 sandwich for a Subway-like $5 without altering its underlying formula. This might prolong the chain’s death, but it won’t prevent it — not in a land where, in the last 20 years, the number of restaurants has increased at twice the rate of the population.

Great, I thought, sitting in an auditorium of equally confused journalists who wanted nothing more than to get back to the newsroom. So are we an Escort or an Explorer?

The “brand” results were turned into a campaign in which the Rocky was described as a “Power Tool” for our readers. It was plastered across the sides of a newly acquired black Hummer that occasionally drove around Denver but mostly sat in our parking lot.

Friday, the Rocky, with a daily circulation of 210,000 and 457,000 on Saturdays, became the nation’s largest newspaper to cease publication in an economic recession that already has sent the Chicago Tribune and both of Philadelphia’s daily papers running for bankruptcy cover, among others, and put a For Sale sign on the Miami Herald. If we were a Ford, we ran out of gas 55 days before our 150th anniversary.

“We had a beautiful thing here,” our editor, John Temple, told us as we huddled around the news desk on Thursday, 230 writers, editors and photographers about to be jobless in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

“I am sick we have to be here,” said Mark Contreras, whose job for E.W. Scripps Co. is apparently shutting down newspapers.

“Not as sick as we are,” said one reporter, sotto voce.

“This was one of the best newspapers in America,” Contreras said, and the ‘was’ made our breakup complete.

“It’s not you,” said the reporter. “It’s me.”

Soon after that meeting, along with the TV crews and photographers wandering our newsroom to capture the final moments, a couple of guys began dismantling the lights and sound equipment for television production that most of us had forgotten were there.

The TV equipment was the artifact of yet another failed idea to save the paper called “convergence.” “Convergence” meant that print reporters tidied up and reported to our miniature newsroom set and tried to breathe evenly while discussing our stories on-camera with our local TV station “partner.”

Convergence came after the Power Tools campaign, but before someone in Scripps decided the Rocky should look like a magazine: Stories stayed on only one page, maybe two, and nothing jumped to the back.

Then we learned to Twitter and Flickr, to use our cellphones to take pictures and video and to carry our computers around so we could drop and blog, wherever we were. When the Democratic National Convention came to town in August, we were told we could wear portable tables that hung from our necks and folded out, like the cigarette girls of old. Unfold the table, fire up the laptop, and type. In other words, we didn’t even need to sit down to write.

Despite all of that — the time-suck of the marketing, the anxiety attached to learning the gimmicks — the Rocky won four Pulitzer Prizes between 1999 and 2009.

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I remember the day I decided to become a reporter. I was 17 years old and riding a city bus on a sunny afternoon in a Rust Belt factory town in Indiana. I lived on the edge of a neighborhood called Shed Town and I didn’t know anybody who didn’t work with their hands, if they worked at all.

I had recently read “All the President’s Men” and I was enchanted by the idea that knowledge could right wrongs. But I had no interest in presidents. I wanted to write about people like me.

The Rocky gave me that chance for eight years. I spent most of that time covering Denver Public Schools, a poor, majority-minority (55 percent Latino) district with 75,000 kids desperately struggling to halt the downward spiral afflicting most inner-city school systems today. I was lucky to hang out with Julissa when she rapped to the superintendent with the Yale Law degree that he was treating her classmates like animals, and privileged to follow Ricky as he tried to fit into a high school full of kids from homes that didn’t look much like his.

I seldom tripped over TV reporters doing the kind of stories I did and I doubt education stories will ever pull the kind of Web hits that sports stories do. Editor John Temple gave us permission to do that work anyway, spending months on projects tracking eighth-graders through graduation and exploring why one in four children in Denver don’t attend the city’s public schools. Knowledge may not always right wrongs, I found out, but it is the only thing that’s got a shot.

– - – - – - – - – - – -

Most of us journalists at the Rocky ignored all the marketing efforts that were meant to save the paper. We shrugged off the “Ford” brand, Convergence and the rest of the gimmicks, even those annoying folding tables. If there is a “brand” that we embraced, it was embodied in the instructions that were once posted in our managing editor’s office. Three simple rules, not produced by a focus group: Get the news. Tell the truth. Don’t be dull. I’d like to believe we did all three.

Born in Brooklyn in 1922, the regional chain moved, in body and spirit, to the Long Island suburbs, just like the upwardly mobile strivers who bought their jewelry, furniture and housewares there. There was a store on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which proclaimed a different sort of aspiration, the desire to rub shoulders with Tiffany’s and the Plaza Hotel, but the store in Westbury, on Long Island, was the flagship and the mother ship. It anchored its own dowdy minimall, called the Mall at the Source, built around it in the 1990s. But the bridge-and-tunnel icon could not survive the tug of Target in one direction and more effete yup-scale retailers in the other, and is now in liquidation.

As with the demise of many 87-year-olds from Long Island, the death of Fortunoff was sad, but not unexpected. In February 2008, the owners who had bought the chain from the Fortunoff family filed for bankruptcy. Lord & Taylor’s rescued the brand and its 19 stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, but the second Chapter 11 filing came a year later. On Feb. 12, the company laid off 300 of its 1,800 headquarters staff in Westbury. Liquidators purchased nearly $100 million in inventory not long thereafter, and a chainwide clearance sale began the last week of February.

Clearance shoppers of a certain age interviewed by Long Island’s Newsday newspaper, tribune of all that is 516, evinced great nostalgia for the chain. William Friedrich of Queens, 69, was shopping for miniature trains. His wife was shopping for bridal gifts. “Now we’ll have to go to Target,” said Friedrich. Amalia Kanaras of Long Island, 68, had been shopping at Fortunoff for 40 years. She purchased a pearl necklace. Rosemarie Godfrey, also 68, also of Long Island, and a former Fortunoff employee, said, “I came to mourn.”

Mervyn’s, which at its peak had spread from the Bay Area across the country and totaled 300 stores in 16 states, was the kind of retailer more likely to be found in a strip mall than a galleria, more East Bay than Marin or Palo Alto. Morris was proud of his loyal blue-collar clientele, and claimed to have been the first retailer to offer revolving credit.

But after he sold out in 1977, he began to feel that Dayton Hudson, the precursor to Target, was neglecting his stores. Mervyn’s expanded, and then contracted back to the West Coast. In 2003, Kohl’s entered the California market, a director competitor in the bargain clothing business.

Target sold out to Cerberus Capital Management and Sun Capital Partners for $1.25 billion in 2004, and the private equity firms quickly proved more interested in Mervyn’s real estate than its retail business. They made a healthy profit by selling the real estate and then leasing the buildings back to Mervyn’s.

Mervyn’s was hit hard by the recession, which arrived early and in full force in California. Anecdotally, there were signs that Latino customers, who had become an important constituency, were not spending on work clothes at the chain because the construction business had faltered. Mervyn’s had shrunk to 149 stores by the time it declared bankruptcy in July 2008. It held liquidation sales through the Christmas holidays. There were still 18,000 workers at Mervyn’s when it went under; many of them did not receive severance, were stiffed on vacation pay, which has been withheld by the bankruptcy court, and are having trouble collecting on their 401Ks.

Store brands like High Sierra, Hillard and Hanson were snapped up at a bankruptcy sale. But the name of the store may live on. More than three decades after their father left the business, Mervyn’s three sons have bought back the trademark and the customer list. They plan to relaunch the chain as an online store. “I think there will be a Mervyn’s name on the horizon somewhere there,” says Mervin Morris, “just how and when and what the magnitude will be I am not sure. That is going to depend on my boys.” Kohl’s, meanwhile, has sucked up 31 of the old Mervyn’s locations in California.