5 ms·
Wait, what? Blockbuster did end late fees, and it was widely regarded as a disaster, because then people took their sweet time returning rentals (above and beyo
by SilasX 5y ago
Wait, what? Blockbuster did end late fees, and it was widely regarded as a disaster, because then people took their sweet time returning rentals (above and beyond the lost revenue):
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39332696 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39332696
>Blockbuster tried dropping its late fees a few years ago, but that didn't work out well because it kept the most popular DVDs out of its stores for long stretches.
- RussianCow 5y agoI don't know this for a fact, but I'd wager a guess that interest in rental movies is mostly concentrated around a handful of titles at any given moment, whereas interest in library books is more evenly dispersed. This means that two people are much less likely to want to rent the same book at the same time, as opposed to the same movie.
- duskwuff 5y agoLibraries do sometimes get a lot of interest in hotly anticipated new titles sometimes. You're generally right that there is a lot more "long-tail" activity than in a video rental store, though -- and it's much easier for a library to maintain a collection of rarely used books.
- alisonkisk 5y agoThat article clearly mentions the late fee drop as a side note compared to the disruption of Netflix, and also uses the useless metric of "revenue per disc" which is OK "all else equal", but is nonsense in the context of a switch to longer rental periods / hoarded discs. And apparently BB didn't bother to buy backup discs for hoarded discs. Finally, it's just different, because a book checkout is a 3 week lend but a movie is 1-3 days.