I order a tremendoius amount of DVDs from Netflix. Several weekly. I can’t remember ever having this trouble.
I’ve been on Netflix for a couple years now, have rented 100’s of DVD’s from them and only twice have I received a disc that didn’t play right - they were both cracked. I reported them as such, returned them, and had a replacement disc within a day or two.
I’ve only ever had one disc that didn’t play—and that’s because, when I opened the envelope, I found that it had actually been shattered in transit—and that has to be close to two years ago. Maybe longer.
It depends on what you consider ‘better’. All of my computer DVD drives are much more picky about marginal DVDs than my 2 consumer DVD players. Its probably a matter of the DVD player software on the computers being less willing to error-correct strange data than the software in the consumer DVD players.
I get my Netflix from a distribution warehouse about 30 minutes from my house. Turnaround is mostly astounding. On average, I get 6 disks a week. I love it. Now, I do occasionaly get a disk that’s fairly scratched but not nearly asbad as I was getting when I would rent from the library. Jesus, just because the DVD’s are free to rent doesn’t mean you need to skip them across the asphalt as you leave the parking lot.
Do any of you try cleaning your discs? I work in a video store. The customer-service practice is, when someone brings in a disc and says it doesn’t work, to just apologize, put it through the $3,000 buffer, and send them on their way. I got tired of this real quick, because the culprit was usually fingerprints, not scratches. (We eyeball all out going discs and buff them if there are visible scratches.) After a little while, I began to notice that it was usually the same people who had problems with their discs. So now my practice is to first ask, “Did you try cleaning it?”
And guess what? 9 out of 10 times, the answer is No. Now that’s just retarded. You’d rather drive it back in the rain and fume about it to an underpaid wage slave than run some dish soap over it? So when they say No, I explain that, when you’re dealing with a rental or library disc, you should always be prepared to clean it. You never know where it’s been; people bring things back in any kind of condition. A woman the other day said, kind of put out, No, and then I looked at her disc: a children’s disc with an actual booger on it. She did *not *get a credit.
It’s my understanding that most disc players are more likely to be stopped by a fingerprint than a scratch, unless it’s an especially deep scratch, or runs along a circumferic* path rather than a radial path; radial scratches are easily skipped over.
So, again I ask, do you clean your discs? Whenever I get a disc from the library, or a rental, or Netflix, I learned long ago to check it over and wash it with dish soap and a soft towel, proactively, if I didn’t want to stop half way through and do it anyway.
*I just made that word up.
With regards to the difficulty of contacting Netflix by phone, I can conclusively tell you all that they have a large call center going on line now and they’re expecting to be 24/7 by January '07. I know this because I interviewed for a position with them, and a very large number of our people have been hired away… So look for the customer service number to be much more prominently displayed soon.
On balance, I love Netflix, after using them for about a year and renting an estimated 200 discs. Their shipping is abysmally slow (turnaround time: 5 days or more, and I live within a 1-day mailing distribution point), but their other features outweigh that.
But I have had only one disk chipped, and not in a way that would affect playing, one cracked, and one or two that had minor defects that caused play problems for a few seconds. The minor ones weren’t enough of a problem that I asked for a replacement, although I certainly would not have accepted them if I had purchased them.
And my player was $50 from Wal Mart.
“Circumferic” – isn’t the word you want “circumferential”?
I would imagine, unless you are physically dropping off and picking up discs at the warehouse, that you put them in the mail. So how do you get 6 a week (I’m assuming the 3-at-a-time plan)?
I put one in the mail Monday (early). It is received early Wednesday, or maybe late Tuesday. There is a 6-hour delay between receiving and shipping the next one, which means “shipping today” is shipped after daily postal pickup deadline, and it doesn’t go out until the next day. It NEVER goes out the same day it is received. So I get a new one Friday. If a holiday intervenes, it takes 7 calendar days from ship to receive. If my queued-up selection is unusual and not in local stacks, it takes another day to get it from across the country.
USPO claims 99.99% overnight delivery from source to destination (150 miles away), so I don’t blame them. How come Netflix treats me so badly?
Netflix prioritizes their customers. This is based both on my personal experience as well as what I’ve read on-line, and there are a lot of websites that discuss it.
New customers are the highest priority and they’ll ship your new discs as quick as they can. When I was a new costumer I once popped a disc off at the post office in the morning, it got to Netflix that same day, they shipped my new disc off the same day and I got my next disc the next day approximately 23 hours later.
But, they have a business plan where they’d really like to make $2/disc off you. Once you’ve been a customer for a while and especially if you return your discs too fast, you drop in priority. Basically, if you’re paying them $20/month and you’re turning in more than 2.5 discs per week, they’re liable to start playing the “throttling” game.
First they’ll say “shipping today” which means they’re going to wait as long as they can so your disc goes out too late to make it to you the next day.
Then they’ll pretend they haven’t received your returned disc for a day or two, which combined with the “we expect to ship your next disc today” technique and the fact they don’t do anything on Saturdays Sundays or holidays means they can slow you down to a six or seven day turn-around if they really want to.
THIS is why I quit Netflix: I went overnight, no explanation, from a <48hr turnaround to a >96hr turnaround. Which essentially doubled the price I was paying per disc. Beyond infuriating. So I dropped it.
I think, technically, it’s “circumferatious.”
The first month I subscribed, it was unbelievably slow. 11 months later, it is exactly the same slow speed. It hasn’t slowed down, it hasn’t speeded up. I even tried returning discs to more remote locations, which didn’t speed it up, and sometimes slowed it down more.
And about 1 in 15 is “lost”, at least briefly. I know it is lost if I don’t get receipt confirmation within 3 business days, but I am not allowed to complain until 6 calendar days have passed. And sometimes I get envelopes with nothing in them (torn open, perhaps by automated equipment). All of the ones I reported missing were subsequently found (by Netflix) except one.
I would go with another company if there were one with the same choices.
Now, now. No need to get confrontationous.
I’m not a netflix subscriber, because virtually every disk I’ve rented from the local rental store has skips/jumps/whatever on my player, and I assumed they’d be just as bad. My player appears to be as finiky as the OP’s – pretty much any scratches, fingerprints, or dust at all and it’s going to skip like mad. Maybe it’s time for a new one.
Again–do you clean the discs?
Beats me then. Where’s your nearest shipping facility? Do you have any other problems with mail delivery in Sturgeon Bay? I used to live in Green Bay and we though you guys were totally the boonies. 
I tried Blockbuster on-line for a little while but their service was abysmal.
Years ago, boonies was a good description – I couldn’t get 1 day Fedex delivery to/from anywhere in 1976 – but times have changed and that is no longer the case. USPO claims near-guaranteed next day delivery within a 350 mile radius, which includes Chicago. Yet the nearest Netflix dist point is Milwaukee, only 150 miles. UPS ground only takes one day from Chicagoland. I even get less-than 1 day delivery from UPS ground in a sense, since some warehouse operations like office supply stores will take an order placed online on Friday and I get it Monday. That means to me they not only work on the weekends (which Netflix does not), but they fill up a truck or container on Saturday and/or Sunday, then it gets picked up by the shipping company, sorted and in the outbound residential delivery trucks by sometime Monday.
I am really impressed by the companies that do this. Netflix is not one of them, and it seems to be to their advantage to be that way.
Spend some real money this time and get one like I did, for the princely sum of $50. Top of the line at Wal Mart. 
He he. My dad signed up for Blockbuster’s free trial. He picked three disks, and shortly thereafter received three emails telling him that they were on the way. Later that day, he received an email that thanked him for returning one of the three.
He wrote in to customer service, pointing out that it was a pretty crappy system that couldn’t seem to figure out that there’s no way he had returned a disk well before he could possibly have received it. He received a form email back.
A few days later, he received two copies of the movie in question, one copy of another, and a third movie that he had not requested at all.
Not particularly inspiring.