Movies. Games. Gadgets. Anger.
Dear Blockbuster, this is why you’re going bankrupt
EDIT: As pointed out by a commenter below, Tron was in fact out of print and in Disney’s vault at the time I wrote this. That and my response below in the comments.
Last weekend, I went to one of your bigger stores in the area to rent Tron. You didn’t have Tron, not on Blu-Ray or DVD. One of your helpful employees checked, and none of your stores in the area had it, either. A cult hit with a major sequel coming out in just a few months.
I couldn’t find anything else on Blu-Ray that I wanted to watch (how is it that Netflix’s barely stocked Watch Instantly selection is better than your store’s Blu-Ray area?), so I rented Kick-Ass. Kick-Ass, by the way, is not a very good movie.
I paid $3 for a one-day Blu-Ray rental, when I could have gotten it at a Redbox for $1.50. And I have to take this video back to the store I rented it from instead of just dropping it off at any Blockbuster that I happen to be near. I also had a late fee sitting on my account. From months ago. So that’s fun.
I think I’m just going to up my disc count from Netflix next time.
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I did find out that the original Tron was out of print later on, and I’d forgotten I’d even written this post, so I did mess up there. That doesn’t excuse the generally poor movie selection at the remaining Blockbuster stores. It might as well have been some other obscure culty movie.
As for the logistics of returning a movie wherever you like, Redbox seems to have that figured out, and while I don’t have actual numbers in front of me, I’m pretty sure they have about six million more locations than Blockbuster.
I, too, used to be a Blockbuster employee back in high school. This is why I have trouble returning movies on time — old habits forced out of taking home five free rentals a week and forgetting when they were checked out. And even back then, in the VHS days of yore, people returned videos to the wrong store ALL THE GODDAMN TIME.
You know how we got the videos back to the right store? Occasionally, we’d bundle them up and mail them to the other store, but generally, an employee who lived fairly near the other store would be tasked with driving the videos to their home store. Off the clock, naturally.
Now that we live IN THE FUTURE, it really wouldn’t be so hard to work out an inventory management system that gauged demand for certain movies by store in real-time, and tracked the inventory and returns at store level. Then movies could be shuffled around to stores that need them on a weekly basis as either part of an existing logistics network, via UPS or post office, or via a designated low-wage employee shuffling them around town in his Saturn. Whatever works. Of course, that would require two things: 1) Blockbuster to update their TWENTY YEAR OLD inventory and POS system, and 2) Blockbuster’s leadership to have some kind of imagination and foresight.
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I’m the last person to defend Blockbuster as a company. As a (former) employee, they are horseshit to work for and lie to their employees as often as they lie to their customers.
That being said, try blaming the right people for your “misfortune”. The original Tron has been out of print for years. Blockbuster is not the only entity not carrying it. You want to “random rage” against someone, rage against Disney for holding back the re-release until they could tie it in with the forthcoming sequel and make more money off sales.
As far as you not being able to return it where you damn well please, suck it up and look at that logically. If everybody returned their movies wherever they felt like, some stores would have zero stock while others wouldn’t be able to get through the door for wading through piles of movies from other locations. Suppose they DID carry Tron but the last asshat to rent it decided to just return it wherever they felt like. Now nobody can rent it because the store it came from doesn’t have it and the store it went to can’t rent it out until the computer says it’s ok (which it won’t because the ‘home’ store needs its one and only copy back).
And for your last thing with the late fee….try getting your movies back on time and accepting responsibility when you don’t and you won’t have to worry about that now will you?