Blockbuster BS

I get a little steamed from time to time when I receive bad service from companies I pay good money to, but I get even more steamed when the follow up to a concern also treats me badly or tries to feed me the proverbial bull shit line. This is one of those times.

We have a movies by mail subscription through Blockbuster and we’ve really been disapointed with the service lately. We’ve received the same titles twice (sometimes in the same mailing), we’ve received discs that won’t play (badly scratched or otherwise damaged), we’ve received formats that our player doesn’t support (even though the right format is indicated in our account) and, worst of all, the turn around time has been what we feel is excessive. I’m not talking about the mailing time. We’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with that. What bugs us is the sometimes two days it takes between getting a notice that a movie has been received back by Blockbuster and the the notice that another has been sent out. With a three-movie package this amounts to six days collectively of waiting on them.

So we contacted Blockbuster with our concerns and got the typical customer service email, all sweetness and nice, except for the part where they blamed us for the delay:

“We want to send you the movies that are most important to you as reflected by the priority you’ve set in your queue. If your top selections do not show an “Available” status and you have fewer than 15 “Available” movies in queue, we may wait an extra day or two before we send something out so that we’re always shipping the titles you want most.

“It appears this is exactly what’s happening with your account. The titles near the top of your queue are on unavailable status.   To ensure consistent, prompt shipments please try to keep more than 15 “Available” titles near the top of your queue.  Once you take a few moments to do so, I’m certain you’ll see something shipped by the end of the next business day after your queue meets our recommendations”

In case you’re not a Blockbuster subscriber yourself, or just don’t understand all that technical stuff, there is a place in your online account manager where you select movies you want them to ship. You select the movies and they go into a queue which displays on a page showing which movies are available and which are not. The “not” is mostly because the movie is popular and they just don’t have any more available in order to send one to you. That’s okay. They have lots of movies and we can always find something suitable to request.

What I can’t fathom is why they (the people actually processing the movies) would see the “not available” titles at all. From what the customer service rep, a person by the name of Stela, suggests the person doing the processing looks only at the first 15 (or so) movies in the queue and ships out something out to us only if one of those fifteen is available at the time. That is not only poor database processing it is just down right stupid!

Sure, as the customer, I probably want to know what is or isn’t available so I can add to the queue as necessary to have something available for the next shipment, but the person doing the shipping doesn’t have to know about not available titles. He only needs to see the titles on my list that are actually available for him to ship and then ship the first one out next. That would be good logic, good practice, and good database programming! But I guess it’s too much to ask. To think that I have to manually manage (ie: sort) my list appropriately (ie: available titles in the top 15 places) myself to actually be able to receive a title selected from those actually available is not only bad use of the database resources, and the shipper’s time, by Blockbuster itself, it flies in the face of reason because the “available” and “not available” status can (and does) change all the time. I could spend time ordering my list to have available titles in the top 15 positions only to have them all be “not available” by the time the Blockbuster guy goes to ship something to me. His time in checking is wasted and, according to customer service, I won’t get a movie because I, the customer, didn’t manage the list correctly.

This is totally silly and I cannot believe it is the policy and procedure that Blockbuster management intends. If it is then management needs a shake up. Of course, their recent financials suggest this may be the case anyway! I suspect, however, that Stela is either incompetent in her position, lying to me, or just didn’t bother to check my account (which had over 100 movies in the request queue at the time) and proceeded to send me her standard BS replay hoping to baffle me, as they say, with it.

All I can say is that the other guys are looking pretty good to me at present. Though I suspect they have their own “Stella” and procedures that no longer follow intended policy as well. ::sigh::