Blockbuster sucks too

Based on my experience with Blockbuster yesterday, I am now, more than ever, anxiously awaiting the point in time when I tell Luke, Sam and Madison about this quaint concept that used to exist where people actually needed to go to a store to rent movies.

I rented a couple of video games back in September, and returned them in their drop box about a week and a half later...Well within the allotted time they give you to hold onto a rental....

Yesterday, went in to rent Sam a game for the WII....The guy behind the counter, who happens to be the manager proceeded to hand me a copy of the last game i rented back in September, and said "you own this now". I was really confused. Apparently if you don't bring back the game within 40 days or so, you end up owning the game. No warning is provided, no email notification, just a charge to your credit card (in this case, about $65) for the 2 games that they say were returned late. The manager thought this was really funny - chuckling at times - as I voiced my concern. I would've thought it was pretty funny as well, had he mentioned any sort of desire to remedy the situation - which he didn't.

My belief, which I stated to the manager, is that they had a process issue with their drop box - I returned the games when they needed to be returned, but somehow they were misplaced once inside the store. This was confirmed partially when the store manager couldn't even locate the other game I had returned on the same day...He actually said that they had no record of it being returned.

I did receive a call from Susan Feldman the district manager for Blockbuster last night, and while she repeatedly scolded me for returning the games late - even as I restated to her what actually happened - a credit is to be issued to my account.

It really highlights a pretty major challenge for companies with dying business models and a proven inability to rise to the technological and organizational challenges of changing markets. How do you find motivated, customer focused staff to join your soon to be a cautionary tale operation? In this case, my expectations for service and product have been molded by Netflix...The antiquated use of technology and sub-par service at Blockbuster is just night and day from what I've received from Netflix.

So i'll be checking out Gamefly today to see if that better meets my expectations, and am pretty sure it couldn't be any worse than Blockbuster.