As an employee at the corporate offices for Movie Gallery (Hollywood Video and Game Crazy are our subsidiaries), we were notified yesterday that the decision was made to liquidate the company.
Many of you already know that we've been closing a lot stores in the last couple of months, however the original plan was to keep about a total of 600 stores operational (60 Game Crazy, 100 Hollywood Video, and the rest Movie Gallery).
Starting in about two weeks, every store under Movie Gallery will start the liquidation process. I recommend that if you have any store credit or gift cards, go get them used up. Cash credit can be refunded (like preorder deposits that you gave them $5 for). Once liquidation begins, it is unclear if customers will have access to their store credit, however gift cards should still function. Liquidation is expected to run for 10 weeks.
More information should be available Monday, May 3rd on our websites for
Game Crazy,
Hollywood Video, and
Movie Gallery.
Unfortunately I cannot go into the details of why this ended up happening, however I will say that it had very little to do with competition from companies like Netflix, Redbox, Amazon, or even GameStop, and really was the result of our own poor decisions.