Back in December, 2008, I raved about how sweet I thought Blockbuster’s Total Access service was. Well, after 9 months of using their service, I made the switch today to NetFlix. To be fair, I thought I’d post another Love It / Hate it review of their service just like I did for RedBox.

Love(d)

The fact that I could drop off a movie at any local Blockbuster store and get another one (up to 5 per “billing cycle”) was pretty cool, I have to admit. Also cool was the fact that if I dropped off a return at any local post office, Blockbuster would usually receive it the same day and within two days I would have another movie. Those cool things alone kept my interest for 9 months.

Hate

• Blockbuster’s selection of new movies, quite frankly, sucks. Yes they do have most of the “blockbusters” but are lacking when it comes to anything else. A “new release” to Blockbuster could be a ten year old movie.
• Blockbuster doesn’t respond to customer service emails. Not ONCE has Blockbuster EVER responded to an email I sent to them through their customer service site.
• Whenever you order a double-disc title from Blockbuster, they count it as two movies checked out. And when they send it to you, the two discs may or may NOT be delivered at the same time. (In my case, they NEVER delivered double DVD movie sets to me at the same time). This is no big deal if the second disc was a bonus material disc, but quite annoying when it’s an extra long movie divided into two discs.
• If you receive a disc that cannot be played, they will not issue a credit and they don’t care about the quality of the disc. See my previous comment about them not responding to emails. I’ve had at least a couple bad DVDs sent to my home. I have several DVD players at home to use and in each case, none of them worked. But does Blockbuster care? Apparently not!
• Blockbuster waits a while to inform you that your queue is empty. Why not tell me the moment my queue is empty? Oh that’s right because I pay for the service by the month so the longer you wait to tell me, the more inventory you have in your warehouse!
• Blockbuster doesn’t inform you of long wait times. If you have selected some obscure DVD from their inventory, they’ll put it in your top 3 wait queue for sure. But they won’t tell you that the DVD is likely not going to be available for a while. Worse yet, in case where the DVD is completely unavailable, they still leave it in your queue and don’t tell you about it.

So Blockbuster, if you wanted to know why I switched to NetFlix, these were the top reasons. Something tells me though that even if you had responded to any of the emails I sent you, you wouldn’t care. And that’s a shame because just like RedBox who doesn’t listen to their customers, you just lost a customer for not listening as well.

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