I was just dropping my latest Netflix DVD into the return envelope and noticed that it was addressed to "Nearest Netflix Shipping Facility, P.O. Box blah-blah-blah, San Jose, CA.
WHAT? I’m in the middle of CHICAGO! I live exactly half a mile from the nearest Netflix facility, and their discs still routinely take 3-4 days to arrive already…but this is the final straw. First they throttle accounts, and now they’ve resorted to tricking customers into shipping movies much farther away in order to slow down their turnaround time?
This happens sometimes when your movie is shipped from another location. The solution? Store some extra envelopes when you can send two movies back at one time such as Mondays when you’ve watched two over the weekend.
I know a few times I’ve gotten an email saying that my local distribution center didn’t have the movie I requested, so they went with another center rather than waiting even longer.
I heard somewhere that the Netflix envelopes are scanned at the post office, and hence are considered returned at that time and not when they finally reach the Netflix shipping center. If that’s true, then it shouldn’t matter.
So? Do you expect the Netflix people to personally deliver your DVDs straight into your waiting hands? I think your problem lies not with Netflix, but with the Postal Service.
With Ballbuster, usually right after I return home from redeeming my envelopes, I get a message in my email that says they received my movies and are shipping some shit from my queue.
This is fine except on the rare occasion when you say, return an envelope and take out Fast Times at Ridgement High, only to get back home and see Spicoli shipped before you could update your queue. That sucks. Undermines the whole process.
I live in the Chicago suburbs, and I usually get an email saying the expected delivery date and it arrives on that date. I’m usually mailing it back to Indiana, which seems odd, but what the hell. The logistics behind the Netflix must be incredibobble, to deal with that many films, that many subscribers, and still come as close as they do?
When you go to a store and pick up exactly what you want, you have it immediately. When you’re using a mailing service, there’s a lot less precision over the delivery. Oh, shit, last Monday was Martin Luther King Day so I didn’t get my DVDs from Netflix until Tuesday. I mean, big hairy deal. Set reasonable expectations.
They are scanned at the post office, but only to tally up the postage charge. Only after the PO knows how much the bill is will they release them to Netflix. This is true of any business reply mail.
However, I don’t believe Netflix has any data ties with the PO, and to scan a returned disk and properly credit it to an individual account would require opening up the envelope and scanning the barcode on the disk or internal envelope, and I doubt that the PO has access to Netflix’s database.
Also, I have outlined in other recent threads how I feel Netflix goes out of their way to stall the recognition and reshipment, as it is to their financial advantage to be slow in the turnaround process. Of all the shippers I deal with, they take the cake in slowness.
To solve the distant return address problem, I scanned an envelope with the closest facility on it, then printed out a few dozen of the address area, including the barcode, on plain paper. Then when I get one from Timbuktoo, I just paste a new label over it. Since Netflix states clearly that they don’t care where you return it to, I’m sure they are happy with getting it back as I mail it. Haven’t had any complaints yet.
Anything shipped from ~150 miles away in a timely manner should be delivered overnight. If you don’t believe this, enter the source & destination in the official USPO web site postage calculator, and see how many days they estimate for first-class mail:
The PO would not need access to the Netflix DB for this to work, they would just have a one-way data feed from the PO to Netflix.
In any case, with some Googling, I’ve found several references to Blockbuster using this Post Office service, and not Netflix. Either the person who told me about it (my boss) misheard, or I misheard my boss.
Or it’s just a rumor, I can’t find anything about it on the Blockbuster web site, just various blogs and message board postings.
True, but they would at least have to open the outside envelopes. I didn’t know the USPO cooperated this much with private businesses, and Netflix is so far from the cutting edge of shipping efficiency it’s laughable.
No, they wouldn’t. The return envelopes they send me, at least, have a window cut in the outer envelope in such a location that, if you insert the inner sleeve correctly, the barcode is visible from the outside.
And so far (in, I must add, less than three months of membership), every one of my discs, sending or receiving, has been processed as quickly as I could reasonably expect. (I have gotten every ‘received’ confirmation within two business days of sending the disc–usually the next business day–and receive the disc they claim to have shipped within, again, no more than two and usually one business day.) So call me a (so far) satisified customer.
I’ve heard the idea that the window cut-out in the Netflix envelope is for processing returned movies, but I think this is wrong.
I think instead it’s for processing outgoing movies. The envelopes are stuffed manually at Netflix, at a rate of up to 1,000 envelopes an hour. So I believe they are stuffing movies into unmarked envelopes. Once the envelope is sealed, the address is printed based on the barcode of the movie contained within.
From what I’ve read, the P.O. will actually deliver the DVDs to the nearest Netflix shipping facility, regardless of the SJ P.O. Box. Netflix is one of the US Postal Service’s largest customers , so they’ve been able to work out a number of special arrangements with them.
Which only makes sense. Why would they want all the disks back in San Jose when they’ve gone to the trouble of setting up shipping facilities all over the country? Then they’d have the expense of shipping disks back out from San Jose to the other facilities. Much more logical to predict that if a movie is rented in the zone of a particular shipping facility, it’s likely to be rented in that area again.
My disks always arrive the day after they are shipped (unless there is a weekend or holiday involved). My returned disks are always received the day after I drop them in the mail (again unless there is a weekend or holiday involved).
It sounds like you should be yelling at the old USPS instead of Netflix.
Bah. I too once thought the Netflix service was great, as good as you could expect. But once you leave the honeymoon period (first 3-6 months for me) the service gets horrendously bad. It now takes around a week for them to recognize I’ve sent in a movie. Then they tell me my new movie will be there tomorrow, but it never is. I have about ten more days until my next billing date, so I hopefully I will get the movies I should have gotten last week by then and get a chance to watch them before I cancel. I used to recommend Netflix to everyone, now I’m trying to figure out some way I can take revenge on this evil company for stealing my money for the past two months. I hate hate hate Netflix. I’m not switching to Blockbuster though, I’m gonna start using the library for all my DVD needs.