I live right by a Red Box and a Blockbuster Express. So I rent a lot of movies on a whim. WTF? Why are so many scratched up? Are people doing this shit on purpose? I’m not talking dirt or a couple of streaks. I’m talking scratches like yo’ mama does down yo daddies back!
Are some of you giving these to your un-de-clawed cat to play with? WTF?
My brother grabs CDs and DVDs with the whole hand, and that hand can be as dirty as it is - given that he’s a construction foreman and his wife’s honey-do list includes things like “rebuilding a whole house”, that can be extremely dirty.
The first time I saw him do it that way, I told him how to do it properly. He pouted “bah, won’t hurt them none.” “OK, so if you want to do that to your disks, do it, but not to mine. Mine, clean hands, thumb in the hole and a couple of fingertips at the edge.” “:rolleyes: O… K…”
He scratched one of the disks in Littlebro’s copy of Fallout 3. Littlebro’s salutation for several months was “well, where’s my replacement disk?” Oh yes, he did get a replacement disk - and when the first one turned out to be a badly-pirated copy, held out for a new copy of the game: several more months of “well, where’s my replacement disk?”
He whines that “DVDs don’t last shit!” and Littlebro and I look at each other and say “gee, wonder why? Ours do last!”
So in at least the one case I personally know of one person whose disks don’t last shit and are often not so much scratched as gouged, it’s a case of stupidity rather than malevolence; apparently Middlebro just can’t grok that grabbing a DVD with your whole unwashed hand while drywalling or handing one to your toddler to play with on the sandy floor is likely to cause damage.
I’ve noticed this also. And here’s how I would phrase the question: When I complain to them about the scratches, and they send me a free replacement, what happens to the one I complained about? Do they take it out of circulation, or do they at least count up the complaints, and remove it from circulation when the complaints reach a certain number?
Ooooooo! Why don’t you smack him upside the head!
I get DVDs from Netflix and often they are dirty or gross or scratched. People have no respect. My DVDs last for years, too.
Difference of how people treat property they own and property they don’t own. Ever wonder why rental cars look like shit after a year?
DVDs from the public library can be especially bad. I’ve checked out some that look like they were mauled by a belt sander.
Since we seem to have a plethora of Redboxs surrounding us we have made it a habit to rent from the ones in more upscale areas. It seems the cleanliness of the discs is directly proportional to the income levels of the renters. (i.e. don’t rent from the redbox at the McDonald’s across the street from the subsidized housing units).
Are you saying that the poor don’t care about the property of others, but the rich do?
I’m sorry but I’ve noticed the same phenomenon as Hampshire. Disks rented in upscale neighborhoods tend to be in much better shape than those in lower class neighborhoods. I’ve lived in both and rented DVDs from multiple sources (we had both Hollywood Video and Blockbusters in both neighborhoods).
The worst are CD borrowed from library. I used to listen to audiobooks from my local library, and apparently it’s common for some people to mistake a belt-sander for a CD player.
It may be a topic for another thread but yes, that is what he is saying and for good reason. I think you actually know this but are demonstrating knee jerk shock because you are offended by its implications. Do you honestly believe that people take better care of property in general in poorer areas as opposed to wealthier ones? We aren’t comparing one person against another here. It is about DVD samples and the likelihood that they will accumulate more abuse in some areas versus others.
I feel a scientific study coming on!
Directly, he’s saying that his experience is that the rental kiosk DVDs in upscale areas are in better condition than the ones in less affluent areas. Whether this is because wealthier people are more knowledgeable about proper DVD care or because poorer people don’t care about property that isn’t theirs or because the lower-income kiosks are stocked with junk DVDs or even filled with angry knife-wielding gnomes is another topic.
On a program about short-term stock purchase vs. long term investments, the commentator made the obsrvation “nobody washes a rented car”. If they haven’t spent a lot of money on it and it does not have to last for a long time to satisfy them, then odds are the average Joes will not put a lot of effort into care and preservation.
I knew a guy who listened to CD’s in his car, in the days before MP3. He had a stack of bare CD’s in the center console, it was a dusty town, and every time he went around a corner, the whole stack slid one way then the other. He borrowed a CD of mine once, and it came back covered with parallel sets of scratches, from fine to not-so-fine. It was still playable, but a week more of this treatment it wouldn’t be.
With a rental DVD, I’m sure people are sloppy - drop it or pinch it in the closing tray or stack a bunch of them on a hard surface, pick it up by sliding it across the dirty surface, who cares?
As for quality vs. neighbourhood - likely the ones in upscale neighbourhoods are rented a lot less, since there are other options like driving to a rental store, or buying the most popular discs.
Plus there’s the learning curve. I used to live near a gravel highway, and the indigineous locals had never learned to slow down when passing each other, so most vehicles had at least one serious star on the windshield from flying rocks. Why didn’t they slow down? Because it doesn’t matter if you slow down, the other bozo flying past at 60mph will still break your windshield. Same with rentals, why take care with a disc when it still means you get crap out of the machine? All it takes is one bozo.
There are differences between the two, but I see a lot of similarities between the responses in the book abuse thread and this one. In that thread, there are all sorts of ideas, from initially bending the book so it’ll lay flat to “I’m loaning it, and I don’t expect to get it back, so I don’t care what happens to it” to [Little Nemo’s** post:
Renting DVD’s is definitely a loan, not a gift, so it seems to me that Little Nemo’s idea can be expanded beyond just borrowed books.
Another idea: the DVDs in the nice neighborhoods don’t get rented as often. Affluent people are more likely to have a Netflix sub and just get them delivered to their door, or stream, or download media on iTunes, or get it some other way. Redbox et al. always struck me as kind of a po’ man’s thing anyway.
We’ve destroyed a lot of DVDs around here. The kids watch the same few things over and over again, and they’re just not all that careful about handling DVDs. I can’t get all that worked up about it, but I’m inclined to think that DVDs/CDs/whatever should be harder to damage. It really doesn’t take much to scratch one up.
I rented a car once for a 9-day, 1800 mile road trip with the two destructive kids mentioned above. I took that car to the expensive car wash where they freaking clean everything before returning it, largely because I was embarrassed about the quantity of pretzel crumbs and french fries and whatnot the kids left behind. Judging by the reaction of the guy at the rental car place, I think it would be safe to say that very few people wash rental cars.
We’re far from “affluent”, but we have Netflix, and have gotten quite a few DVDs that won’t play. They sometimes look like they’ve been used as first base in a baseball game. Netflix or Redbox… it doesn’t matter. Some people just don’t give a shit about stuff like that. There’s a mentality of “It’s not mine, so it doesn’t matter how I treat it.”
OK, but that’s not the issue being discussed. People were claiming that comparatively speaking, the Redbox DVDs in nice neighborhoods were in better shape than the ones in bad neighborhoods. I posited that because people who live in nice neighborhoods are more likely to use Netflix and other services over Redbox, then those DVDs might be in better shape simply because they haven’t been rented as often. If Netflix DVDs are categorically in about the same condition as Redbox DVDs (and also get rented at the same frequency, which is likely not the case), then that would actually constitute grounds for rejecting the null hypothesis that people from a higher socioeconomic status treat rented DVDs better.
Ref Rigamarole - I’m gonna posit that the nice folks at Redbox HQ are smart enough to place their machines where they get enough use to justify ther existence.
If the machine at the QuickieMart by the projects sells $100 of videos a day, they’re gonna expect the one at Snooty McFruities all-Organic Lexuses-Only Market to also sell $100/day. If not, they’ll pull it and put it elsewhere.
Sure there’s going to be some variation in revenue from location to location. But their strategy is NOT going to be to put a Redbox at every store in town regardless of how much sales it generates.
So ballpark, each Redbox machine shouuld have DVDs with about the same number of rentals on them.
Correlation is not causation. Poor people don’t trash DVDs because they’re poor. They’re poor because (among many other things) they have a lot of bad & unsocial habits, one of which is little respect for non-owned property, or any property at all. Or more accurately, little foresight.