Bradley Video has closed all of its stores three months after it sought protection in bankruptcy court and tried to reorganize its business.
The Santa Rosa-based company, which has five stores in Sonoma County, another five elsewhere in the Bay Area and one store in Reno, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Aug. 2.
Customers trying to return DVDs to Bradley Video's Mission Circle Store in Rincon Valley yesterday were greeted by locked doors and signs posted in the windows reading: "Bradley Video is closed for business. We will periodically check for returned movies left in the drop box. Thank you for all of your support through the years."
Oakmont resident Chuck Warner, 78, visited the store to return a DVD Tuesday afternoon and said he was surprised and disappointed by the closure.
"I think it's strange they didn't give people any notice of any kind," he said.
Calls to the company's headquarters on Sebastopol Road and to attorneys representing both the company and William Bradley were not returned yesterday. No one answered the phone at any of Bradley Video's 11 stores. A telephone greeting at its Sebastopol store said: "Bradley Video is closing its stores for good, and the store is closed. Happy Halloween."
Steve Brown, a 20-year-resident of Rincon Valley, peered into the darkened Mission Circle store and saw the floor littered with popped balloons. He said he liked the store's atmosphere, knowledgeable staff and its liberal return policy.
"I liked the fact that they went to seven days to return videos," said Brown, 59, as he dropped the baseball comedy Fever Pitch into the return slot.
A competing store, Video Droid, pasted flyers on Bradley's shuttered business encouraging customers looking for the latest Star Wars movie to head to its store on Mendocino Avenue.
Mark Lowe, vice president of Video Droid, called the stunt "guerrilla marketing." He said he knew Bradley Video was in trouble when he read about its deal with the Portland-based video distributor Rentrak Corp.
The distributor offers a system that allows businesses to acquire DVD inventories with low upfront costs, but then takes a cut of each rental, Lowe said.
"When I see a company do that, I know they have cash-flow problems," Lowe said.
Lowe said his employees alerted him late last week that they had heard Bradley Video's last day would be Monday. Bradley has about 100 employees.
The 20-year-old company was in the midst of its bankruptcy reorganization when owner William Bradley also filed for Chapter 11 protection on Oct. 15, two days before new, tougher bankruptcy rules took effect.
Bradley's bankruptcy lists $7.8 million in assets, mostly in real estate, and $8.6 million in liabilities, most from creditors including banks and business partners, such as Rentrak, which claims it is owed more than $2 million.
As president of the company, Bradley reported an annual salary of $216,000.
It is unclear from court records why the business bankruptcy plan appears to have fallen apart. One of the company's creditors, Holbrook Plaza Associates, LLC, is the landlord at Bradley Video's Concord store. The company was seeking $11,355 in back rent, and said it would seek to have the company evicted for nonpayment.
Bradley Video had thrived in Sonoma County for many years, even after facing stiff competition from Blockbuster in the 1990s. More recently, new competition came from the growing popularity of mail-order rental companies such as NetFlix.
Lowe said he thinks the chain simply expanded too rapidly.
"They made a lot of expensive mistakes over the last year," he said.
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