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Not to dance on someone's grave but to me this is fantastic news. When Blockbuster was the dominate player, they were quite the nasty bully. Ridiculously high l
by city41 16y ago
Not to dance on someone's grave but to me this is fantastic news. When Blockbuster was the dominate player, they were quite the nasty bully. Ridiculously high late fees that were very hard to avoid. Half the time you'd return the DVD on time, but the employees wouldn't inventory it until it was too late and still hit you with a fee. A fee which they were extremely reluctant to remove. Their customer service was downright awful. Before Netflix came around I responded by stopping shopping at Blockbuster altogether and just started buying my own movies. Even at $20+ a pop, it was still more convenient and less stress filled than hoping Blockbuster would show you some mercy.
I'm very glad to see the market can respond and a new player can come in with a better business model and treat customers better, and win. It's reassuring.
- jonpaul 16y agoI couldn't agree with you more. I'm glad that Netflix and RedBox have torn Blockbuster apart. I knew this day would happen, and I don't want to wish any employees any financial hardship, but the company itself deserves this.
- Mc_Big_G 16y agoI was insanely happy when all of the "Movie Gallerys" went out of business in my area. Fist pumping and the whole nine yards. Few businesses treat their customers as terribly as video rental stores. Multiple times, I had to physically lead their employees to the video I had returned, weeks earlier, to prove that the $89 (or whatever ridiculously high) late fee was bull$#!*. Dying in a fire is too good for these stores because then then could collect the insurance. :)
- clistctrl 16y agovideo stores suck, but to say few stores treat their customers as terribly is to not be giving as much credit to gym memberships as they are owed.
- svjunkie 16y agoI don't think video stores deserve to die because of their treatment of customers (though I'm too young to have had much experience renting from a brick&mortar store). I think they deserve to die because they refused to innovate as competitors built the infrastructure to overtake them. They scoffed as Netflix and Redbox built brands that would come to dominate the industry, yet their too-little-too-late offerings were not competitive with the newcomers despite having considerably more resources at one point.
- nhebb 16y agoI never understood the concept of buying movies. How many times can you watch the same damn thing?
- MrRage 16y agoThere are a lot of movies that are rent only or even watch it only if I see it on TV. But good movies (for some definition of good) are worth multiple viewings.
- docgnome 16y agoI don't know. Sometimes I just like to turn on my favorite movies as background noise. Maybe I'm just weird though.
- avar 16y agoThat's like asking how many times you can read the same damn book.
- nkassis 16y agoI don't get it when people find it weird that I will reread some books multiple times. I've read some books once every year or so and even my wife thinks I'm weird. She's a serial book reader (150 books as of now for the year, almost one a day) and will sell them as soon as she reads them, I don't work that way even after she tries to push me into selling some books I just can't.
- towndrunk 16y agoI agree but the creditors are the ones getting screwed now because of the way Blockbuster ran its business.
- ben1040 16y agoI found that thanks to Blockbuster's late fees (I was habitually unable to return movies on time) I would spend at least $25 a month, and in exchange I usually was able to watch two movies. Sometimes I'd rent a movie and never even have time to watch it. I'd end up bringing it back a week later, unwatched, and have to pay another ten bucks in late fees on it because I sat on it too long. I switched to Netflix 7 years ago and never looked back. I still have DVDs sitting around that I haven't watched yet, in spite of them having been mailed to me 2 weeks ago. I do watch a streaming title two or three nights a week. For all that I pay way less than I ever did to Blockbuster. Netflix is probably making tons of money off me since I am so slow to mail back movies, and yet I'm totally happy with the service I'm getting and feel it's worth the price I pay.
- chc 16y agoFor a little perspective: Blockbuster's biggest competitor in the western US, Hollywood Video, had much worse late fees. They wanted to charge my mom something like $100 for a video she kept a few days over. (It's been more than a decade since then, so I don't remember the precise details, but I do remember it was several times the purchase price of the movie.)
- pyre 16y agoIt's of note that Hollywood Video was bought by Movie Gallery, and Movie Gallery went out of business earlier this year.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agoI'm very glad to see the market can respond and a new player can come in I would suggest it is not quite "the market". It would have been the market had a competitor arrived before the technological advancement of the internet. As that was not the case, it is rather, or it should rather be a praise to the advancement of technology, and quite a condemning example of "the market".
- CamperBob 16y agoRedbox would have killed them if Netflix hadn't. There are always at least a couple of people in line at the tiny Redbox kiosk in my local grocery store. At some point it occurred to me that that little kiosk was bringing in pretty much the same gross revenue as a 10,000-square-foot retail store, and that's when it really sunk in that video rental stores were history.
- pigbucket 16y agoClassic exchange re late fees http://www.27bslash6.com/blockbuster.html http://www.27bslash6.com/blockbuster.html