Does Blockbuster still do the “In stock or it’s free” thing at their stores? I’ve been a Blockbuster Online member pretty much since they started the service. I went through the growing pains with them. It was actually fun sometimes to see what distribution center my movie was going to be returned to – it changed with almost every movie it seemed. Then they became a little more popular and movies weren’t as readily available… that was ok though, because I still got the in-store coupons.
But now I’m getting frustrated.
First they keep jacking up the price. Usually not by a lot, but I think when I started it was like $12/month now it’s $20. I guess I can’t really complain … I can still exchange movies in the store as often as I’d like and I get two coupons every month for a free movie or game rental. All the new customers don’t get them at all I think. But the trigger for this outburst is their Blu-ray support. I was excited when they announced they were going to be exclusively Blu-ray. Besides helping to end the format war, I hoped this meant they would have better stock. Nope. The top 15 movies in my queue are all Blu-ray and every single one is “Long Wait” or “Very Long Wait” … I might go complain. They’ll just send me an extra coupon for this month (which I hardly use the two I get anyway) They do seem to listen to their customers though. A few weeks ago I sent a suggestion to let me choose a default format (as it is now you have to click on the movie, then click on all editions, then find the blu-ray version if it exists) they wrote back and said “Great idea!” I just noticed it in the FAQ section that it will be a feature ‘soon’ … guess I wasn’t the only one!
So yeah … all that just to complain and show my impatience 😀