One of the stores in mind had an outside dropbox akin to a drive-up mailbox, which was designed for a driver to deposit movies without having to find a parking space, and the other store had an after-hours slot, yet a movie returned before store opening on the due date was ignored for a full day before marked as returned. I’ll be more clear in my righteous indignation from here on.
Stay tuned for my rants on the vagaries of the dollar menu at McDonalds.
Bingo!!! They still charge a “late fee.” They’ve merely redefined “late” and “late fee.”
If you can’t return a movie by 7 days, being especially aware of the consequences, two possible problems might be:
you’re renting 25 movies at once;
you are not responsible enough to rent movies.
Ah, OK. Then them Blockbuster bastiges are Blockheads, buster.
The reason I assumed differently is because the store where I worked had a completely different setup. I took that as the setting for your story. My bad.
Also, I’ve heard some wild and wacky return stories. My roommate worked at a store where a mail slot was blocked off by a thick wooden dowel. One night, somebody sawed through it to return a movie. On another occasion, someone returned a VCR by “creating” a return slot in a plate glass window.
Assuming the “restocking fee” is equivalent to the now defunct “late fee,” all they’ve done is extended the viewing period (without late charges) to 7 days, and extended the fee for a “one-day late” movie to 30 days. What happens after 30 days? Are you then required to purchase the movie? Or, are you then charged late fees? Or, are you then charged increased restocking fees?
Unfortunately for you, $4.00 is still waaaaaaaaaay more than a DVD of The Paper Chase is worth. You might be better of never finding it.
tdn! I havn’t worked there for ages, and lord knows I hate Corporate as much as anyone else. And yet I, too, still find myself sticking up for the damn place. Maybe it’s just that we had to deal with so many dumb or even worse lieing customers that we side against them by nature.
Anyway, Blockbuster is frantically trying to fix it’s business plan. The number one thing that people hate is late fees. It doesn’t matter if they are just or unjust or what- people just react violently against them. However, Blockbuster does need to make money and they can’t make money without their stock. Late fees are not a plan to scam you out of stuff- they really do make up for lost revenue. The recent plan made a lot of sense- you rent it, and if you keep it longer than the rental period, you automatically rent it again. And yet still every day I’d argue with people about why they need to pay a weeks’ worth of extra rental fees on the movie they kept for eleven days. There is no way to make people happy when charging late fees.
It seems a little complicated for Joe Customer (trust me- many people thought extended the rental period twelve hours was a plot to get more late fees) and people really hate having stuff charged to their cards. I think what they are really trying to do is get people on to their Netflix-type thing. They will likely charge fair prices for the movies- usually around ten bucks but maybe more like fifteen for new releases. But what will keep people from just renting new realeases and getting essentially new movies for used prices? And what will we do when some smart person runs off with all the great out-of-print stuff?
[QUOTE=lno]
Per the article, Blockbuster expects to net more money from this than from the late fees. More power to them — I can’t count the number of times I put a movie in the drop box the night it was due, only to find out that they didn’t bother to scan it until the next day and dinged me with late fees.{/QUOTE]
Blockbuster has countless locations, and regulates everything from how high the workers can make stacks of videos to how many pockets can be on their pants (no more than five). A reasonably busy location checks a thousand videos in and out every day. They are pretty familier with the ways that unfair late fees can sneak in there and have numerous ways of preventing this. If they just plain didn’t check in whole boxes of movies until too late (and they do have a substantial employee-side grace period to get stuff checked in) they would not only be violating the current rules that you must completely empty all drop boxes five set times a day, but they’d have to deal with every single customer for that whole day complaining. It just doesn’t happen like that. Unfair late fees do sometimes happen (and BBV employees know what they look like- they also know what it looks like when customers lie or are mistaken) and they are easy to take off.
Oh how they’d like to. BBV employees used to be able to look at rental history and suggest it if it looked like a good deal. Then the Texas corporate office decided to start tying hour (that these people depend on to pay rent, eat, etc.) to number of promotions sold and to heavily punish them and the store if they didn’t pull the pitch of every darn customer even if they just rent one movie every five years and the line is building up to unholy lengths because you have to give a stupid pitch to everyone.
One day I will make a post and do the quotes right.
I didn’t know that. Well, we went to Hollywood not because they had better selection or whatever, but because the two Blockbusters near us had really bad customer service. Downright rude.
Poo, I forgot the other part. It’s “lyin’elf”, dontcha know?
d&r
There’s a women’s sex shop in town that does this with books and videos (not toys, I wouldn’t think). You take the book and give them your credit card number, they deduct 10% of the cost of the book every week until you return it (or until you’ve paid for it). Sounds like a good model to me, it lets you try it out before you commit to buying it, and you have to pay the full price (but no more!) if you lost it.
From my reading of the article:
(1) You rent movie for seven days
(2) If you do not return movie within the 7 days, but before 14 days, no sweat
(3) If you return the movie more than 14 days but less than 30 days after rental, you will be automatically charged for the movie (less the rental fee), but can still return it for credit less a restocking fee (unclear whether it is store credit or a credit to your charge card).
(4) After 30 days, you own it.
Essentially, they are now giving renters 14 days, 9 for new releases (which are normally 2). But of course, no matter how changes might benefit a customer, someone is going to complain about how shamefully evil corporations are out there sinfully trying to make a profit off of the hard-working public.
I think the policy is very fair. FWIW, I have incurred late fees exactly one time in 15 years. And they waived it as a one time courtesy. 
Of course, I also drive five miles out of my way to go to one of my bank’s ATMs so I don’t pay the ridiculous $3 fee. I’m a tightwad that way.
Thanks, D_Odds, for the clarification. The article is somewhat ambiguous. All Lou Dobbs said was “Blockbuster was eliminating late fees to stimulate slumping stock figures and compete with rival Net Flix.” Which isn’t entirely true. They can call it what they want, but they still are charging a fee for the lateness of a movie (although they’ve extending the period). I am not against this; but I’m also not going to pretend they are not charging late fees. Anyone who complains about BB extending the period in which they will charge a fee for a late movie, while holding the charge itself constant (again, assuming the return stock fee is similar or equivalent), should really consider whether they should be taking posession of things that they do not own.
You need to get your knee out of your mouth.
The paragraph you quoted doesn’t even imply that corporations are “huge monopolies” or that they “force [people] to rent movies at gunpoint.” Nor does it say that Blockbuster’s new strategy is evil, or that consumers don’t have choices in America.
In fact, all the quoted paragraph alleges is that Blockbuster, like any other corporation, is attempting to maximize its profits by taking in more money from its customers. And, as the article linked in the OP makes clear, this is exactly what Blockbuster is hoping for—that reduced income from late fees will be more than offset by increased business.
Do you free market whores have some sort of guilty conscience, or inferiority complex, that makes you jump all over someone for simply asserting that capitalist entities are profit maximizers?
Underlining mine.
Actually, it does happen like that. People spit in hamburgers, too, even though it’s against Corporate Policy[sup]TM[/sup]. I never said I couldn’t get the late fees taken off. I observed that having unjustified late fees in the first place is something that annoys me.
I’m surprised that you, of all people, would defend a barren, desolate Blade-Runnerish corporate state where we will all slave like, well, slaves, for the great military-industrial complex as it grinds our souls into the dirt.
For what it’s worth, I never worked at Blockbuster. I worked at an independant Mom and Mom store. (I’d call it Mom and Pop, but the owners pretty clearly pitched for the other team.) And we considered Blockbuster to be the epitome of evil.
But yeah, late fees were not an evil scheme to shake down customers. Nor was making people pay $100 for a lost video. Ghost comes to mind. The studio charged us $100 per copy of this wretched dreck. We could only afford 3 copies. At $3.50 per rental, we’d have to rent each copy 29 times just to break even. That’s a total of 87 rentals. If someone kept a copy out one extra night, that was $3.50 that we’d lose in revenue. Our late fee of $2.50 helped us to lose money slower, but it was still a loss for us. And when one customer left a copy in her car, on a hot summer day, and it melted, then yeah, we charged her $100 for it. It was lost revenue, and we could hardly afford that.
Not to mention that when we didn’t have popular movies available, customers got mad and took their business elsewhere. The threat of late fees helped to keep titles on the shelf more often.
No, you need to go Clue*Mart and stock up.
What the paragraph implies is that the policy change will result in larger fees per customer rental – that’s what the scare quotes were about. Fucking moron.
No, I just don’t like it when assholes such as yourself imply that consumers are powerless in the face of those profit maximizers. Of course companies are profit maximizers. They want a raise just like I want a raise. But that doesn’t mean they always get one. In this case, what Blockbuster is doing is trying to maximize profits by pissing off their customers less and hoping that the customers will come back instead of signing up for NetFlix or getting digital cable with VOD or NVOD (you’re aware, aren’t you, that the so-called “rental window” has been shortening?). Consumers are smart and have alternatives. They’ve been abandoning Blockbuster for better deals. Blockbuster is reacting (in part) by removing one of its policies which caused the most pain to consumers. It’s not a case of “‘late fees’ that they ‘don’t’ ‘have’ ‘anymore.’” It’s a case of late fees they don’t have anymore.
For whatever it’s worth, they’re also reacting by trying to increase sales of DVDs, by trying to become a gaming center with sales and rentals, by offering a Netflix-like product, by driving better bargains with the studios to offer better prices and a bunch of other stuff. And all this stuff, in reaction to good old fashioned capitalist competition, is increasing choice and decreasing price for the consumer. The invisible hand of the marketplace is stroking the consumers’ dick here and the consumers are liking it.
Commie scum.
Blockbuster is a great evil, treat their workers horribly, schedules customer service out of the picture and uses unfair practices to push small business owners out of business. There are plenty of bad things that BBV does.
There are also plenty of evils that they arn’t responsible for. For example, people rag on Blockbuster’s selection. The selection that is sent to each store is figured out through a computer program that analyzes what people rent at each store rents and sends more. Movies that havn’t rented for a while get pulled. My store had a foreign section to rival my University’s collection, because I live in a hoity-toity neighborhood. If your Blockbuster sucks, blame the rubes around you.
Blockbuster employees do not enjoy charging late fees. The number one worst thing about the job (besides the mind-numbing boringness) is fighting day in and day out with people. Every time someone’s account pops up and there are no charges, we smile on the inside, because that is one more customer that won’t end up throwing crap at you. I WILL tell you there is NO Blockbuster anywhere that will let a whole box of movies sit there past the check-in grace period. Our whole lives revolve around the due time. It determines everything from what shifts are which and when managers work and who goes on break when.
I remember at my store once a stack of around forty movies got back on the shelf without being scanned in (A rare, but possible occurance- you will never be charged for it and we have ways to find them eventually- one way to keep it from happening is to make sure your movies always get turned in to the box or an employee’s hands- never leave them on a counter. Only movies that are checked in are allowed on the counters, and anything on the counter is treated as checked in) and we felt the pain for weeks. Every other customer was upset because the fees wern’t fair, our store got penalized because corporate thinks that any credit is most likely a case of you giving stuff away free to your friends, not fixing legit complaints, and we got yelled at constantly by everyone. I can’t imagine what kind of hell it’d be if we regularly let whole boxes go late. The mystery masochist Blockbuster that increases their workload with the worst kind of work doesn’t exist.
But if I had a nickle for every time I had someone tell me how to do my job when they actually had no clue what was going on or how it works…well, I’d make more money.
Jesus, you are fucking idiot.
Sorry, let me re-phrase that…
On behalf of those members of the American public who don’t have their pompous heads stuck up their condescending asses: eat me.