Why Blockbuster Fails
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008We used the Blockbuster movies-in-the-mail system for quite a while. It was nice being able to take your movies into the store and switch them out. I felt like we were getting twice the amount of movies as Netflix. Sure, the mailed movies were a bit slower than advertised, but I still felt we were getting enough movies to justify the price.
Then they changed up the system. Suddenly they wanted to charge you a higher price to bring your movies into store to exchange it for a new movie. We opted to try it the regular way, but their slow speed of getting movies sent to us quickly became more obvious. Some times it would take 10 days to get a movie to us. I don’t think it ever took the time they advertised. I sent them a emails asking why we couldn’t get the movies faster, they gave a canned response. I wrote another email, and got more worthless babble. So I just canceled the account and set out to try Netflix.
What a difference.
We send our movies in the mail. Netflix gets them the next day. They ship the movies. We get them the day after that. Everything works as advertised. Plus, we get emails at each step.
Today they went the extra mile. Apparently they had problems on Monday, a day one of our movies was supposed to ship. They were nice enough to give us a 5% credit off our next bill. It’s small, but it makes me happy.