Wrong DVD label, Part 3

By Shamus Posted Friday Jun 23, 2006

Filed under: Rants 10 comments

Last time I mentioned that I put a little magic marker dot on the faulty disc and mailed it back to Netflix. I put two stickynotes – one on the disc and one on the sleeve – with each clearly describing the problem. Today, I got my “replacement” disc in the mail, and there is my little black dot.

Now I’m pissed off.

Keep in mind they have now done this twice. Two times they have gotten the bad disc, tore off the bright pink stickynotes, and mailed the exact same disc back to me. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt before, but it takes a special blend of stupidity and apathy to do what they have done. I’ve now spent most of June mailing the same faulty disc back and forth with these morons.

My wife came up with a good idea, which is to request another copy without sending this one back first. This will force them to send a different disc, which might not have this particular problem. This might let me finally watch the rest of Last Exile, although I resent all this wasted time and effort. The notes were clear and those discs should NEVER have gone back into circulation, much less sent right back to me, the guy who wrote the notes.

I did find a phone number here, along with a few things that got on my nerves. First up:

Most Popular Website:

Netflix is the #1 rated website for customer satisfaction for two consecutive years, according to ForeSee Results surveys in the spring of 2005 and January of 2006. In the fall of 2005, Fast Company magazine named Netflix the winner of its annual Customers First Award.

Really? A company with no customer service interface gets somehow rated #1 in customer satisfaction by some outfit which I’ve never heard of? Asinine.

Then this is just regular stupid:

If Netflix members, instead of receiving movies by mail, drove two miles each way to a rental store, they would consume 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day and release 8,800 tons of carbon dioxide emissions daily or more than 2.2 million tons annually.

Yeah, thank goodness for those solar-powered mail trucks.

 


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10 thoughts on “Wrong DVD label, Part 3

  1. Pete Zaitcev says:

    Oh please. I understand that you’re angered, but you do not seriously think that a UPS truck burns more than your car, despite that its engine is always warm, that it’s a diesel, and it delivers more than one package?

    The Netflix’ suckage is well known. Google for “netflix throttling”, for a nice example. People put up with them for the same reason they go to Fry’s: it’s cheaper by a lot.

  2. Nathan H. says:

    In defense of the ecological adspeak, a mail truck delivering a package to 100 different households, is a lot more energy efficient than having every one of those households send someone to drive individually to a central point.

  3. Shamus says:

    Well, this is where their ad becomes a little dishonest. They are assuming you go out and make a car trip for each and every movie, and that you don’t accomplish anything else in that trip. I’ve never known anyone to do this. People naturally avoid it. As in, “I’m running to the drugstore, I think I’ll stop by Blockbuster and get some movies.” On the other hand, the postal service must transport your discs hundreds of miles.

    You are both right that mail delivery uses less fuel, but their comparison is pretty misleading, as it greatly inflates the fuel used on one side while ignoring fuel used on the other.

  4. Shamus says:

    Oh yeah: Pete you are also right that this wouldn’t even bother me if I wasn’t already irritated with them.

  5. Ethan says:

    Ecological advertising? One more reason to never use Netflix.

  6. Puff says:

    Anyone know what happens if several of the discs you return have “accidents”, like say a night out with steel wool?

  7. Shamus says:

    They claim that if your account has too many damaged discs they start charging you for them.

    It seems like if they were smart they should keep track of the history of a disc. The person who scratched it is usually not going to be the one who reports the scratch. If I gouge a disc and send it back, odds are it will go out again to someone else, and they will be the ones to notice. However, they might not watch it. They might notice the scratch and send it back, but forget to tell Netflix.

    So if a disc is reported damaged, the system should look at the previous 3 people, note that they may have scratched a disc. If lots of people reporting damaged discs are using discs that had been previously sent to me, then the system could take note, “This guy is a disc-scratcher”.

  8. Torabisu says:

    A simple solution to the problem might be to scratch the DVD and send it back.

    I had Netflix for 3 years and reported at least 15 DVDs as scratched. They had no problem with my actions. I suspect that alot of people avoid reporting DVDs as scratched and they appreciate it when people do this for them since so many scratched DVDs seem to be floating around in their system.

    Why did I stop subscribing? They ran out of movies. My wife and I are thinking about starting our subscription up again now that we’ve been netflixless for a couple of years.

  9. Kevin says:

    I had a disk arrive snapped in half once, maybe that could happen to this damaged disk since it has been shipped around alot…

    “I don’t know what happened, it arrived broke”

  10. Author says:

    I just hit the same issue and found that Netflix added a radio button “disc does not match the white slieve”. Shamus, I think your diatribe made them do it.

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