Former Red Box employee has thousands of DVDs after company files for bankruptcy

LAKELAND, Fla. — One of the largest DVD rental chains in the country, Red Box, has ceased operations after its parent company filed for bankruptcy.

It’s left many now former employees with no direction on what will happen next, including one previous worker living in Polk County.

Nick Bergmann of Lakeland has been working for years to save enough money to buy a home.

With a competitive real estate market and interest rates higher than usual, Bergmann decided to get a secondary job at Red Box. He’s part of a growing trend — a recent BankRate survey showed 36% of U.S. adults earn extra money through a side hustle.

Things were fine when he started in 2022, but now Bergmann has thousands of Red Box DVDs sitting in his hallway.

Red Box’s parent company, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of June, switching it to a chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in July following claims of alleged mismanagement.

As a result, Bergmann said he’s one of hundreds of employees across the country with money still owed to them, which is partially why he now has a hallway full of DVDs with no spot to deliver them.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with them,” he said. “I guess I have a lifetime’s worth of media to entertain myself with.”

That could be fun, but Bergmann doesn’t even have a DVD player.

“Essentially,” he said, “they are assets of the company, but the company doesn’t exist anymore. So, I guess we’re waiting. We’re just waiting. And I don’t know what we’re waiting for. I don’t know who’s going to tell me what, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Bergmann said he’s still owed about $1,000 for fuel used to deliver DVDs to the dozens of kiosks from Winter Haven to St. Pete.

He posted a video on YouTube to voice his frustrations and the complaints of many other co-workers.

His video, as of this writing, has amassed more than 300,000 views.

“Our rent’s going up,” Bergmann said. “Things aren’t getting cheaper, so we have to work a little harder, and we work every single day.”

Until he figures out what is going to happen to the 2,300 DVDs in his hallway, he will keep representing the Swan City of Lakeland through his ceramics company, Swan City Ceramics, hoping for some direction on what to do with pieces of media from a now-defunct company.