I thought things had slowed down

SOBs movie rentals Throttling down on shipments :banginghe

 

They'll see some turn to blockbuster's service because of this.

 

When a company buys out it's top competitor, then sells all the stock off for pennies on the dollar in parking lot sales, you know things are bad for them. Blockbuster could have absorbed Hollywood Video, but from what I saw they just sold off the stock from the stores they took over.

 

I'm sure BB does the same thing. I just canceled my BB online subscription because they were so damn slow. I usually averaged 8 movies per month. It got to where it took a week and a half to get a new movie. I was going to go with NetFlix since they have a distribution center in town.

 

I did the same thing, dropped BB and kept netflix because of speed.

I had netflix and BB for a while. BB was nice because of the free local rentals (there are times when you just gotta have something specific that night), but it was a lot slower, the selection was smaller, and I was CONSTANTLY getting movies from the middle or end of my queue instead of the top... Netflix friends, fast shipping, great selection, good reviews and somewhat accurate recommendations (BB would recommend things that got 1 star reviews) make it a winner.

 

I use BB and since I live close to their distribution hub (Charlotte) I can get a movie on Monday, and send it back Tuesday morning and have another by Thursday. I have the $14.99 a month deal which also gives me 2 free rentals in store a month. I started with Netflix but the movies came from Atlanta so the turn around was slower. I have never had a movie sent to me out of sequence on my queue inless a higher ranked movie was unavailable and I knew that upfront

 

I live in Charlotte too, and NetFlix in the last year or two is definitely faster to deliver. Most of the movies are actually coming from Greensboro. If I put a movie in the right USPS mailbox Monday morning, it will reach GSO that day, and I often receive the movie Wednesday. I have actually received them the very next day, which was amazing.

It was driving me nuts to see "movie available" at the top of my queue, but receive something from position 20 instead...and their supports only response was "we don't guarantee you'll get movies from the top".

 

I also had a quality problem with BB. I bet I had at least 5 DVD's so scratched they would not play. That and the slow shipping is why I dropped BB.

 

that's pretty bogus, but not unexpected. i remember when blockbuster first opened and put all the stand-alone rental stores out of business by offering "revolutionary" service: no more daily rentals everything was $2 for 2 days. it was a big hit because it was so simple. since then, they've spawned off all sorts of varying rental categories and fees. they got the market and changed their formula. once netflix started to hit, bb changed back to a more simple formula, but it was too late. the netflix model is just too good.

the one thing i've learned with netflix, tho, is to ALWAYS CHECK YOU MOVIE THE DAY YOU GET IT! i've been burned too many times by having movies sitting around waiting for me to watch them and then when i finally find the time, i bust em out and they're cracked in half. pain in the ass.