I know a few of you are avid (occasional?) Netflix users. I read a blog post today about how Netflix ‘throttles’ your movie watching by shipping things a day or two after they ought to. This can, of course, have a dramatic effect on the number of movies you can actually rent under their ‘unlimited’ rental plans.
What’s interesting, is that this policy is actually justified in the fine-print of their Terms of Service:
“In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service. As a result, those subscribers who receive the most movies may experience next-day shipping and receive movies lower in their queue more often than our other subscribers.”
Although one has to wonder if they introduce delays intentionally instead of just ‘prioritizing’ lower volume customers… or, to put it another way, if they can handle their entire turn-over for a given day, will they? Or will they still delay some of the shipments?
This kind of thing is annoying to me — much like “unlimited internet” ISPs who throttle you after a certain amount of traffic in a given month. It’s either ‘unlimited’ or it’s not.
I don’t have either Netflix or Blockbuster or any similar service… I just don’t watch DVDs enough. I would have to guess that maybe they really are having a problem with their turn-around. I mean from what I can tell, their business has exploded. That is NO REASON for bad customer service though. If it gets to be a problem, people will quit, and then either turnaround won’t be as big a problem or they will get the hint and expand their capacity.
There’s a lot of documentation that this is not a supply problem, and the fact that they had to add a disclaimer pretty much cements it. The bottom line is that they have a financial incentive to walk a fine line of customer service that is “just good enough” without being too good and costing them money, or too bad and losing them customers.
One thing’s for sure, though, if I ever start watching DVDs, I’m going to try blockbuster first.
I used Blockbuster last summer and didn’t have problems with it. I will probably sign up again next week after I move.