Thursday, February 19, 2009

Blockbuster Eliminating Due Dates on In-Store Exchanges; Counting In-Store Exchanges as Part of Plan

 

Blockbuster is quietly testing the elimination of  due dates for in-store exchanges in two markets, and will roll this out to all customers in March. Blockbuster is also updating the website so that in-store rentals will appear in a customer's queue and rental history, helping to eliminate duplicate rentals.

Sorry guys, this is stupid. This will do nothing but confuse customers. Customers who are paying extra to have  TotalAccess. Customers who have gotten used to having the whole process of getting the next DVD in the queue sped up by exchanging the DVD in the store.

Don't try to pass this off as a service to the customers - this is a way to make money. That DVD we exchange at the store pushes off the shipping fees to the customer.

Between this move and not being able to get into my queue for about 2 months now I will have to seriously consider dropping my membership. (Oh, and yes the Blockbuster tech guys are 'working on it', and even offer free in-store rentals. Never mind that I have chewed through most of the in-store movies that I want to watch.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have not been able to get into my queue since mid December '08. The movies I really wanted to see were at the top of my queue and forever in a long wait period. I was being sent movies I didn't want so I'd send them right back only to have to wait a week for them to replace it with another unwanted movie. If I could have only got into my queue I could have kicked those unwanted movies out and managed so at least I could be sent movies that were available. I asked Blockbuster several times to go into my queue and kick out some movies or delete them all for me. If (and not very often) I got a reply via email support, they said they were not able to get to my queue either although when I called them they could tell me exactly which movies were going to be mailed to me next.

Finally I had to put my account on hold because of all the problems. It seems only random people can not access their queues. I don't believe for a minute that Blockbuster does not have the power to get our queues working correctly. I think they deliberately shut some of us off. The only reason I do not quit is because if I return with the same plan my monthly fees would nearly double. They used to provide a good service but that was years ago so it seems. I could understand my queue going down for a few days maybe but not month after month like this. This is their way of trying to weed out some of the people they feel are not as profitable without having to go through the lengthy ways it takes to increase membership fees. Don't forget, we all are charged differently depending on how long you've been with Blockbuster.

DerfDaSmurf said...

Blockbuster you guys are idiots! Way to send 40% of your customers to Netflix, doh!

Howard Hill said...

I think mine was a bit earlier than mid-December. I did not have a problem of a 'clogged' top of the queue (lots of movies that are on long/very long wait), but I did have 300+ movies in my queue having it roll over to 2 pages. Not sure if that was the issue or not.

I was still getting my DVDs with no problem, however I could not get in and delete anything I had rented at the store (or bought). I never remove anything from my queue, even when offered, until after I watch & rate the film.

My biggest complaint was this was my issue was clearly something on Blockbuster's side: I tried getting into the queue from 3 different machines with a mix of 2 different browsers & 3 different anti-virus software (what they kept trying to blame, even though none of the anti-virus was Norton). I even had problems when I completely turned off anti-virus.

The idea of eliminating due dates on discs you exchange in the store is just confusing. I still get an in-store rental coupon (subject to due date), my Rewards coupon (subject to due date) and just rent discs (again subject to due date) and exchange discs at the same time. My local store still does the no late fee program, but recently went to all discs being 5 day rentals to minimize confusion. This just raises the confusion level.