Farewell Blockbuster
I just cancelled our membership to Blockbuster Online. We signed up several months ago because it seemed like a good deal and it allowed us to watch videos that simply aren’t in stock at the local stores. I greatly enjoyed watching the original Star Trek series with Kiki. At first everything was fine. But then Blockbuster began consistently sending us discs that were #5-8 in our queue even when #1-5 were all available. I understand that they practice something that is called “throttling” on high volume renters, but I did not think that 1-2 discs per week should qualify us as high volume. The other thing that really bugged me was their handling of discs that had waits on them. We were members for 5 months and we never reached the top of the “Short Wait” queue. How long is short?
All of this would not have bugged me so much, except that we were members at netflix back in 2004. I had none of these problems with netflix. The reason that we chose to go with Blockbuster this time was the in-store rentals that were included with the membership. Netflix can’t offer that. Unfortunately even that incentive has been removed since they’ll be closing our neighborhood Blockbuster store by the end of this month. There were apparently problems with the lease.
This means that Blockbuster will be completely losing our business. Unfortunately they’re so huge I doubt they’ll notice.
When I filled out the cancellation form, there was a large white box for comments. They even had text claiming how important my comments were to them. I obliged by explaining exactly why we were leaving. Then I hit submit and the system barked at me because my comment was too long. Yeah. They really care to hear what I have to say. We’ve been Blockbuster customers for 10 years, but no more.