Blockbuster, YRD2M — for you text illiterate (a.k.a. you don’t know any teenagers) that means ‘you are dead to me’. Do they really think resuming late fees is the answer to earning that $250 million they need to stay afloat? I’ve got bad news. It’s not going to work. It will probably just drive those last remaining customers away. (Well except maybe for those super-responsible people who return their movies on time but you won’t get much out of them anyway!)
Seriously. It was just a couple weeks ago I was at a table with friends discussing a movie I had watched the previous night and somehow I mentioned that I rented the movie at Blockbuster. They all sort of started poking fun at me, saying I was the last person on earth who still went to Blockbuster for movies. They really started cracking up when I let it slip that I paid a $6 late fee at Blockbuster after returning the movie a couple days late. Everyone raves about Netflix, ("it’s like getting presents in the mail every week"), and one neighborhood couple swears by the neighborhood library, (“they have everything and you don’t have to pay — a real no-brainer.”)
Alas, I defended Blockbuster. The one at Northwest and Plano actually employs a guy who knows about movies —unlike that Casa Linda Blockbuster employee who had never heard of a movie called “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, but I digress.
But after a particularly pricey Blockbuster weekend, I have vowed to cut ties. I rented three movies for one night (totally feasible — two were for the children). But then the movies sat in my car a couple days past the due date — which would have been fine a few months ago when Blockbuster didn’t have late fees. This time it cost me. Cost me big time — in the neighborhood of a $23 late fee.
I understand Blockbuster needs its money. Times are tough. But I need a more forgiving movie supplier. I’m sorry Blockbuster, but between my scatterbrain personality and your late fees — this relationship just can’t work anymore.
Library, here I come.
