I sent them a nasty e-mail today. I bought my dad a one-year subscription, which I really regret now. He activated the subscription on the 26th, loaded his queue with movies that were supposed to be readily available and thus far has gotten 2 movies, both of which he returned the next day. A week and a half per movie for them to arrive?! They’re mailing them a little over 50 miles, so it shouldn’t take several days. As far as I know, they haven’t even told him they got the one he sent back on Saturday, yet.
This sucks. I should have just bought him gift certificates to the local video store, it wouldn’t have cost any more than it looks like the average is going to shake out to be for Netflix.
Wait … you mean this isn’t about the class action lawsuit against them, alleging that they were not providing the advertised “unlimited” rental and turnaround times promised by holding DVDs in the returned queue for frequent customers (and ignoring weekends and holidays), which resulted in a settlement last year that paid over $2 million in lawyers’ fees, but the award to the consumer was a month ‘upgrade’ to one extra rental, which the customer had to then opt out of or else pay for, resulting in a whole website devoted just to the fact that the settlement sucks, and which was about to be approved until the FTC stepped in, just today, to say that this sounds more like a cheesy promotion than a settlement and we think something should be done about it?
We get 2 day turnaround in the Houston area (mail on Monday - receive back on Wednesday). Love it. Only issue I’ve had was the occasional damaged disk.
Prior to relocating to Houston, I lived in central Illinois and at that time the turnaround was painfully slow. You had to make sure to mail out on Monday and cross your fingers that you’d get a new one by Friday. Took a lot more planning to be able to enjoy.
Either way, it still beats the Hell out of going down to the video store.
I am loving Netflix after they’ve opened Des Moines, though… It cut down my waits from about 3 days to 1 once it’s shipped. I have noticed a pattern of more shipments being bumped to the next day, though.
If you watch a lot of movies through Netflix, they’ll definitely slow down your service. I experience this over the summer, after seeing 24 movies in June on the three-out plan. They even admit to throttling service here in their FAQ:
I was happy with them while I was still a new customer, but now I’ve dropped into the “rents too many movies” category and they only send me movies once a week.
I’m thinking next month I’ll cancel the account and rejoin. See if that helps.
We just canceled with Blockbuster because about 1/3 of the discs wouldn’t play properly. We’ve never had a problem with discs we’ve bought, or rental discs from any of several local stores, but we’ve had a lot of problems with the mailed discs. Service was always good. We plan to try Netflix in the hopes that they provide a better product.
I too canceled. I used to get a 48hr turnaround. That suddenly doubled, halving the number of movies I could watch in a month. It was no longer a bargain.
I’m still getting excellent service from them. I seem to occasionally hit a bad spot for a week or two, and there’s always a small percentage of discs that get delayed somehow, but I’d say that at least 80% of the time, it’s a three day turnaround - day one, I drop it in the mail, day two, they get it and ship the next one, and day three, I get it.
Mine’s still mostly pretty good (closest distribution center is Cleveland). Typically I drop a disk in the mail, it gets there the next morning and they ship my new one that afternoon. I have noticed a slowdown during the holidays, but that seems to be with the disks getting there and here - which makes me think it’s the postal system more than Netflix.
I also wonder if there was a jump in the number of subscribers over the holidays, especially through gift subscriptions. I’ve had a lot of movies go from “now” status to a short or long wait since around Christmas. I figure that if they’re getting a lot more traffic, it could slow the recieving end down a bit - so it gets to their DC and doesn’t necessarily get checked in that day because of volume.
Oh, one thing I didn’t mention- LR has opened it’s own distribution center…and since then , my wait times have close to doubled. I had figured, even if they don’t have the movioen there, they can scan the return and ship from another center, right? Wrong.
I cancelled Netflix when the Fall TV season began. I’ll probably pick it back up in June. I live in the Houston suburbs, so my experiences were mostly positive. Occassionally, it would take too long, but MOST transactions were return on Monday, they receive and ship on Tuesday, I get it back on Wednesday.
The only reason I would use Netflix instead of a store or DVD kiosk (which are cheaper) is because I like GOOD movies and television shows.
Same experience for me as the original post. I used to like Netflix also, but recently turnaround times increased so much that I’m considering dropping it.
I got chance to try another month of Blockbuster for $1.00. Blockbuster seems to have improved substantially over when I tried it a year ago. It is much faster for me than Netflix now, so I will probably drop Netflix and stay with Blockbuster.
Something of a hijack, but: Does anyone have an experience with Peerflix? It’s some kind of peer-to-peer DVD sharing network based on trading the actual DVDs via the mail instead of electronic files. In other words, it’s Netflix with no warehouses, and you rely on your fellow man to send you what you want. It strikes me as one of those nice ideas that is a disaster in actual operation, like communism and all-you-can-eat buffets.
I just rejoined Netflix after a few years off, and service has been spotty, but the mail delivery in my neighborhood is spectacularly awful, so it’s hard to blame them entirely. After all, if they say it leaves the warehouse on Wednesday and you get it the next Tuesday, it’s most likely the fault of USPS, isn’t it? I first joined when they were brand-new and it seemed that they only had one warehouse – at least, I lived in upstate NY and all the movies came from San Jose, CA. Disks usually took 4-7 days each way. It was frustrating, but the nearest video store was 40 minues away.
Its certainly looking like it. I’ve had Netflix for a couple years now, and it has been consistently excellent - the only things that have ever been a problem is three damaged DVDs (which were immediately replaced) in two years. I’ve had that many in two rentals from BB. I know a few other people here who also subscribe and have never heard a complaint.
I love Netflix. No slow service for us and we’ve had one unplayable movie and we got an envelope with the wrong “Father Ted” in it. We do 2 movies in the good weather and 3 in the winter.
No complaints at all about Netflix, though I wonder how they make money. I have the $9.99/month plan and so far I’ve watched the entire 1st season of “24” and am moving on to “Veronica Mars” and it’s been about 4 weeks. By my calculations, they are losing money on me.
I did have one disk arrive cracked but they replaced it very quickly.
This method is probably more efficient for them, but not because I’ll be sending some random disc across the country as opposed to my local NetFlix, but rather due to the savings of packing return DVDs for remailing immediately on receipt into ready-to-go envelopes, since when they started preprinting the addresses on them, they put a slot in the back so they can tell what movie is in it in order to store and ship it.