• The New York Times, Tuesday, July 17, 2007 10:30 AM

New Blockbuster CEO James W. Keyes says that a few of the tried-and-true strategies he developed as CEO of 7-Eleven might work well at the video rental chain: tailoring the product line to each store, relying heavily on data and automation and reducing the size of the retail footprint.

Keyes hopes to make Blockbuster stores smaller on average, and to customize titles at each store based on rental patterns, much the way he says a 7-Eleven in one neighborhood might have stocked more Corona and another across town stocked more Coors Lite.

A keen believer in crunching data, Keyes even began to factor weather into the store orders--calculating, for example, what doughnuts sold best in hot and cold weather. Such nimbleness could come in handy at a company where the business model has been threatened not only by Netflix, but also by video-on-demand services and TiVo.

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