I used to be a member of Blockbuster Video several years ago and terminated my membership, with much frustration and anger, because they were consistently charging us late fees for movies that were not late. On most of these occasions I was required to pay them a fee because their computers said the video was late (but it wasn’t) and on other occasions the video was sitting on their shelf yet they claimed I had never turned it in and wanted to charge me for it. I understand mistakes do happen but they were too frequent with Blockbuster to be overlooked. The final straw for me was one evening, not too many weeks after spending 20 bucks or so to be part of their special rental program, they indicated a movie we returned was late. The kicker was that we had returned two movies at the exact same time and somehow one movie was late and the other was not. Not matter how hard I attempted to reason with them they refused to accept the fact that we had returned both movies on time. I was so enraged I tossed my membership cards on the counter, told them to cancel my membership and I have never returned. It wasn’t too much later that a class action lawsuit was filed because of problems with Blockbuster charging people excessive late fees: http://www.kugler-kandestin.com/areas_class_blockbuster.html
Then today I came across another article detailing how Blockbuster is going to implement yet another new plan to screw over its customers (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=7094892) by actually charging them the full price of a movie if it’s late by more than a week.
For a company that has continually had problems with charging late fees inappropriately, this is not a smart move. I would warn any customer to no longer rent from Blockbuster because there is a chance you may end up buying movies that you have long since returned and you might not able to get your money back.
Not only do these changes cause concern for existing customers, but the idea of Blockbuster trying to buy Hollywood Video (which is where I go now and have been very pleased) really infuriates me. If they do buy Hollywood Video, I will no longer rent from either place and will be forced to go to an online rental company.
If you are currently a Blockbuster Video customer I would be very cautious about your video rental habits and encourage you to no longer support Blockbuster Video. If you decide to continue renting from them, it might be a wise course of action to get a receipt when you return your movies so you have evidence that they were not returned late.
posted @ Wednesday, December 15, 2004 3:50 PM