While you are right that people should have taken the time to understand the new policy that is just par for the course of moving through life. I don’t think that BB should get off on the defense that people should have know they were lying.
Q: How do you tell when Blockbuster is lying?
A: Their lips are moving.
Not exactly. Keep a movie ten months and here’s the timeline. A week after the movie was due back you are charged for the difference between the full price of the movie and what you paid to rent it. Ten months later if you return the movie then you are laughed out of the store. From the official terms and conditions of the “No Late Fees” section on Blockbuster.com(emphasis original)
You’ve got a week after the due date to return it with no repercurssions at all. On the 8th day, you just bought it. Between the 8th day and the 30th day you can get a refund of what you paid on the 8th day minus the restocking fee. If you request it in person. Otherwise you get store credit for that amount. No automatic cash back if you drop it in the box, gotta go in and wait in line to make sure they refund it back to your credit card. Also, franchise stores can set their own restocking fee. " At present, roughly 18% of the 5,500+ U.S. domestic Blockbuster stores are franchisee owned and operated." The chances that you’re renting from a franchise are roughly 1/5 and the fees may be different. If they honor the “End of Late Fees” program AT ALL. Franchise locations are free to continue charging “extended viewing fees” instead of signing on the corporate line if they wish.
Enjoy,
Steven
I’ve obviously been renting the wrong movies. 
At least at the store I frequent, you can’t swing a dead mongoose without hitting a sign or stack of brochures that explains the policy in clear detail. You’d have to willingly and at great effort ignore the the extremely obvious information. To me “But they liiiiieeeed!” and “They misleeeeed meeee!” are nothing more than childish whining. You kept the movie for 42 days. Suck it up and cough up the buck twenty-five.
This is the problem: a franchise doesn’t sell itself as a distinct store with its own identity; it sells itself as part of the chain, and that’s how it gets people to walk in the door. Accordingly, the people who walk in the door have every reason to expect the chain’s policies to apply at that store. So when I hear the line, “We’re a (different) franchisee, we’ve got a different policy,” I get pretty ticked. There’s no sign out front saying, “not really a {Blockbuster/MickeyD’s/Arby’s/whatever}.”
If they want to have different policies than the main brand, that’s fine - but there should be some distinguishing branding going on - like the way United Airlines has its low-cost cousin, Ted. I can assume upfront that there are some differences between Ted and United on account of the name; I’ve been given fair warning.
Indeed that has been a cause of problems. Corporate is now offering coupons, rebates, or outright refunds to some customers who were charged Extended Viewing Fees at non-participating franchises after the “No More Late Fees” policy went into effect. They have several sections on the topic in their FAQ, accessible from the link I posted about their policy.
Enjoy,
Steven
The amount of whining that people will do just because they can’t be bothered to return a movie in 2 weeks is mind boggling.
It’s amazing how many times we’ll be fucked with a prick the size of a thumbtack, and then have to listen to some asshole saying it’s our own fault we got fucked. If I brought a girl home, and fucked her based upon some false pretense, certainly she’d be a dumb bitch, but that wouldn’t make me any less of a prick. In my estimation, the store should be held to a higher standard of honesty than it is offering, we shouldn’t have to read a terms of service every time we make a $ 3.00 transaction, sure it may not seem like much individually, but when added up to every other Terms of Service we “Should have read”, it adds up and just makes life irritating for everyone involved. So I’m more inclined to holding Blockbuster up to a higher level of honesty than I am toward bitching at people for assuming that a transaction was honest and simple when they walked into the store. I don’t think that we should as a society, have to EXPECT that everyone is trying to fuck us over, no matter how small that fucking may be.
Then again, a class action suit returning $ 1.25 is pretty ridiculous as well, and is part of the culture that has led to these byzantine Terms of Service we have to read for every minor transaction we make.
Erek
Where I get mine they didn’t have squat except a big old sign saying “The End Of Late Fees”. I knew what was going on, but only because of the boards. They never offered to give me anything nor told me about having to bring it back or I would be charged for it, at full price except I wouldn’t get a case or anything for it.
Only in the last few weeks have they put up a sign, as you leave, telling you the details. I think it’s a shit way of doing things, but then again I do take my movies back.
Oh, well, if they didn’t have any in-store information on the new policy, then yes, it’s pretty deceitful. Bad store. No soup for you.
Did they at least say “It’s due back by Wednesday”? This would have at least clued you in that there was, in fact, a due date.
At my store they hammer this home even further by putting a big yellow sticker on the cases that says something like “No late fees does not mean no due date. Please return your movie on time.” Honestly, there are no excuses not to return on time. One would have to be both blind and deaf to not know the policy. But that’s just at that one particular store.
This is what I thought it might be too. A limit on how many rentals an individual could have out at once and then you cannto rent more until you return.
Note: that should be cannot.
Second note: for the record, I have not shopped at a blockbuster for over a decade, henceforth I was just guessing based on the commercials and asking myself “how the f*** are they going to do that?”.
You know my husband was just reading over my shoulder and told me a neat story that I thought should inspire businesses like Blockbuster.
In his college town, there were many video stores (big market for students). There were also the big old chains that tried to drive all the small time competition out. In the midst of these chains was a small store called “Magic Video”. Here, a student could rent videos and games. Just like most students, many failed to return on time. Blockbuster would be charging credit cards, but this place did nothing of the sort. They did not even call the people, except once after the game had not been returned on the due date. How did they not lose money?
When a student went back in and turned the game in, the management always cut the charges at least in half (word got around). Let’s say you kept a game 25 extra days. They charged you just 2 dollars a day and that came to 50 bucks. The manager would then say, let 'em pay 20. Then, they would take your little punch card that you hadto get a free rental and punch it for **25 days ** worth of rentals and give you 1 free rental (need 20 punches) and 5 more on a card. Thus, you went back in dreading paying the fee, but made amends for your debt and got a free rental out of it. Cost to company- nothing, they made money. Value to company- loyal business. The Blockbuster went under in this town, Magic Video is still alive and running.
Says alot about what it means to have a business IMHO. Did Magic get taken at times? Yes, they did. But, this is a time when being a good, honest business person who did not covet every penny, or mislead customers, paid off.
I haven’t rented from Blockbuster in at least 10 yrs and I watched those commercials with much skepticism. But like others have stated I assumed they were going to some kind of rental program like NetFlix has and I never really paid attention to how the program worked. I have noticed lately however that the commercials have changed and they aren’t promoting the “No Late Fees Ever” thing anymore.
But am I understanding correctly that they just changed the name of the fees from ‘late fees’ to ‘restocking fees’???
That’s more diabolical than even I gave them credit for. Why anyone rents from them at all is beyond me. I try my hardest to go to the local video dealers when I want to rent something. I feel better not contributing to a greedy (and evidently dishonest) corporate enterprise.
Actually, Blockbuster does have a Netflix-like program which they will be glad to explain to you, just like they will gladly explain their new rental policy.
The way the old system worked was that they rented you a movie. If you kept this movie beyond the rental period, they rented it to you again. If you still didn’t turn it in by the end of that rental period, they’d rent it out to you yet again until you either turn it in or they give up and charge your credit card for the movie and fees.
The big problem with this is that people hate late fees, even when they are deserved, and late fees could often compound to several times the cost of the movie. There wasn’t really a way to fix this, since nobody else could rent your movie while you have it (lost revenue) and they can’t just restock it because then they might end up with two copies when they need one.
So they switched to a system where they just sell you the damn movie if you keep it too long. They give you a week long grace period beyond the due date to get it in, but if you don’t turn it in they charge you the used price for movies they sell used (usually $12.99) or the new price for very new releases (this keeps people from getting essentially brand new DVDs for used prices). This frees them up to restock the movie and keeps you from having to pay compounded late fees.
However, they give you one more chance to get the movie back to them. At this point they’ve already reordered the movie, but they’ll still buy your movie back 30 days from the day you rented it. They do subtract a small fee from the buyback transaction, though, to cover the cost of rearranging their inventory again. Since inventory is one of Blockbuster’s major labor costs, they have to make up for it somewhere.
It’s not a late fee. It’s a fee on selling back your movie to them.
Yes, and they even had the gall to sneak in a change to the fee structure from $3 per day to a flat $1.25 total if the movie was more than 7 and less than 30 days overdue. The nerve!
I mean, sure, there isn’t a single instance where you would get charged more in the new structure. And most fees are eliminated entirely since the first 7 overdue days are gratis. And the highest fee you have to pay (assuming you actually return the thing within a month) is less than half the rate you used to pay for being a single day late. It’s also $18.75 less than Lissa’s wonderful Magic Video would charge for a 25 day late movie…
Yeah, one might think this new deal is actually a really positive step for the consumer, a huge reduction in hated late fees. Except, Blockbuster is an eeeeevil big corporation, so there must be something nefarious about it. Actually, go to your local video store, and pay them $2 a day for a late movie, THEY are honest people and aren’t money grubbing like BB, even if they charge you 10x what BB would for a week late movie.
Since you people are obviously morons who can’t comprehend fine distinctions.
The $1.25 ($1.75 in Canada) is not a late fee. It is to cover the administrative cost of moving a product from rental to retail and back again, since as a policy BB keeps those two aspects seperate (and always has, even before The End Of Late Fees, so this isn’t something they invented to make money under the new system. This is why if a film isn’t available for rental when you come in, BB cannot crack open a new one and rent it to you). This task takes actual flesh and blood people to do the work, and those people are unwilling to work for free, so BB pays those people to do their paper-pushing jobs with the proceeds from the restocking fee.
There is no lying. There are only ignorant jerks who think that BB admins should work for free.
[lit geek joke]That would be if Edmund Spenser wrote the rental agreement.[/lit geek joke]
I admit I have “donated” more than my fair share in late fees. It began way back in elementary school when I couldn’t get my library books back by their due date. It got so bad, I started buying books rather than borrowing them; it was cheaper. This has carried over into the “renting” of movies. I know I will be charged a late fee, it’s just a matter of how much. The first time I went to Blockbuster after they ended their late fees, I had a late fee of $3.99 on my account. Darn. I thought I had been granted amnesty.
My buddies at work suggested I sign up for Netflix. I explained that I have no problem with steps one (select movie) and two (receive movie). It is step three that troubles me. I would never return my movies. I would have the same 3 movies I started with month after month. I would be leasing movies. Yes, after 2 or 3 months it would have been cheaper to have purchased the movies I wanted to see.
If I understand Blockbuster’s policy correctly, I can rent my movies and keep them for up to a month. If I am late, my new fee will be $1.25 to restock the movie. Hey, I can live with this. For me, it is far less than I have spent in late fees. You would think that returning a video or game within a week of its due date would be reasonable.
I rented Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at Blockbuster a few weeks ago. On my receipt it noted that I’d paid a rental fee of something like $4. On the line below that, it said “Own it on [whatever date it was going to be late] for just $11.25 more!”
I loved the movie, they have at least two copies of it (there was another one on the shelf when I got this one), and I can’t find it for less than $11.25 anywhere else, so I now own me a copy of Fear & Loathing. Go me. Thanks, Blockbuster!