Blockbuster Revisited

Some time ago I wrote about the troubles we were having with our Blockbuster Video by mail account and I thought I should update the reader with what has lead to our current situation.

We continued with Blockbuster, making all the changes in our activities suggested by the supervisor who wrote to us including micro-managing our request list so that only available videos were at the top of the list (a silly requirement as anyone who understands database processing could explain!). We gave them another couple of months to see if things would improve. They didn’t. In fact, they got worse. We sometimes actually went a full week without movies.

Okay, I’m a sucker for punishment but, ultimately, we had enough. We canceled our account and signed up with Net Flix. Wow! We got our first movies in two days. Since signing up we have had all of our new movies the second day after mailing them back, e.g. we mail the movie back on Tuesday, Net Fix acknowledges receipt and mails the new movie from our list on Wednesday, and we receive it on Thursday. It’s never been longer.

We thought this must be some kind of good service given to new accounts but, after several months of the same treatment, it seems like this is S.O.P. Additionally we have been taking advantage of their “free” (no additional cost, really) view-online movies. There are a lot of ‘em and there are some great selections. Often they are the same movies available on the movie chanels on cable.

Between fast turn-around on mailings and the available selection of online movies, we are never without something to watch. At this point we are very happy with Net Flix and recommend them to anyone.