Last week I netflixed the four discs of The Muppet Show: Season One, and dropped them in the mail late Wednesday, but by the weekend Netflix had still not received them, even though they had received & turned around the discs I mailed back on Thursday. This isn’t that uncommon, and normally I’d just wait (muttering curses under my breath the whole time) until Monday for Netflix to get off their lazy butts and log them in finally…but with a whole bevy of discs coming out on Tuesday that I didn’t want to miss, I reported all four of them “lost” so I wouldn’t miss tomorrow’s turnaround. (Often, Netflix will ship new releases a day early on Monday, and if you miss this boat, it’s likely you’ll wind up on the Very Long Waitlist. Just one of those tricks I’ve learned…)
Well, when I logged on this morning, to my horror I saw the message, YOUR ACCOUNT IS ON HOLD PLEASE CALL CUSTOMER SERVICE. Palms sweating, breath quickening, I called their 800 number and after half an hour of navigating their godawful call menu and waiting for one of their minimum-wage temps to answer, I talked to a live person (who, amazingly enough, didn’t speak Hindi.)
Turns out I had crossed their “lost disc” quota, which is cumulative from when you open your account, so they were still counting those three mysterious DVDs that vanished last summer. 3 + these 4 put me over the limit of SIX lost DVDs they allow – a shockingly small number! Thankfully, she agreed to raise my “loss limit” by a few points so my rentals can resume (theoretically) although I’m still just one overturned mail truck from getting banned again.
So if you’ve always wondered how many Netflix DVDs you can lose before getting into trouble, now you know…it’s not much. In other news, Blockbuster Online raised their prices so now they cost the same as (and therefore now have zero advantages over) Netflix; but that’s a different story.
It’s still early. Those four missing DVDs might still turn up. Where do you mail your Netflix DVDs? I try to leave them only in the blue curbside boxes, so there is minimal chance of them being stolen out of the mail.
I don’t think that six is a “shockingly small number”: in the 3 years that I’ve been a Netflix member, I’ve only had to report one disc as lost. But then, I only report discs that are actually lost.
Yes, I guess it is…although with my Blockbuster Online account, their turnaround is so bloody slow that you HAVE to constantly report DVDs lost just so you’ll get your money’s worth! It’s actually very rare that Netflix takes more than six days to turnaround a DVD…and I wouldn’t have worried except for the big new releases coming out this week. (There’s twenty…TWENTY!..discs releasing this week that I want to see! I might have to open two more accounts!!)
And while six may not seem like that small a number, remember it’s cumulative. One here, two there…it adds up. If the post office ever hires back that blind mail carrier who never got anything in the right box, I’m in trouble.
Six seems like a low number to me. I recently had three dvds lost at the same time. I’m fairly certain a neighbor plucked them, but I can’t be positive. Either way we didn’t get them and now I’m halfway to a point of concern for the Netflix people. Guess I should only be returning those dvds one at a time.
How many do you have at a time? (Although I guess it’s roughly the same price to extend your number-at-a-time as it is to get an entirely new account.)
I routinely return two DVDs in one envelope. I figure it saves them the slightest amount of postage, which in the long run, may keep them from raising rates…someday. (Yes, I fully realize I’m probably not saving anyone any appreciable sum.)
Well, she didn’t seem concerned about raising my “loss limit”, probably because I’m a long-time customer. Six in 14 months doesn’t seem as bad as, say, six in 14 days. What bugs me is they don’t work that into the equation to begin with, so eventually you’ll have to call them. Not to mention their automated menu was totally fritzing out this morning, it kept skipping from option to option like a schizophrenic parrot. I had to press zero several times to get into the agent queue. (Oh, and if you ever do get that far, bring a book.)
I do that too, but only because they no longer stamp the envelopes with the local return address. So if they send you something from a distant distribution center, you have to send it back there. Unless you do what I do, which is stockpile envelopes printed with the local address, so you can send them back to the local center (seems not to matter) instead of Lake Hompawannamishpawnsaquett, New Brunswick.
You’ve lost 3 discs in 14 months, while I’ve lost 1 disc in 36 months: perhaps their “6 disc limit” is an average, some kind of balance between people like you and people like me – or maybe not people like us, but people with mail services like ours. If so, that seems pretty reasonable to me.
