Blockbuster opening a distribution center in Honolulu

January 30th, 2008

The Honolulu Advertiser reports that Blockbuster is moving in on Netflix territory by opening a distribution center in Honolulu to attempt to give residents one day service when ordering movies by mail. In the article, they speak with a Netflix employee who stuffs these envelopes for customers at a rate of 3.6 seconds per envelope and most of the time isn’t even looking down at the envelope while doing so. This explains alot.

We are newer Netflix members since November since we were spending equal to or over their 3 movie per month price of $16.99 on new releases every Tuesday. This seemed ideal to us. 2 months into membership I can tell you we’re considering switching to Blockbuster. We received a new release the day it came out ONE time and that was during our free two week trial membership. More times than not we have to wait for 2-4 weeks before we get a new release. Twice we’ve just gone out and rented new releases that are put on “long wait” which is a minimum of 2 weeks. Lord forbid you’re on a “very long wait” which can be 4 weeks!! If new releases aren’t a big deal to you then consider this part of our experience. If we had to average, 1 in 5 discs we receive are either completely unplayable or skip around so much we have to try other players or our DVD drive in our computer to play it. We’ve received discs that have massive scratches, gaping cracks and even received someone’s audio cd they returned by mistake!! If they’re more concerned with pumping out 4 second turnaround times than doing quality control to make sure what they’re even sending you is even a movie then there’s a problem. We called customer service about it and they were nice enough to send us something out while we returned the CD. Assuming they’d put a note on the account we sent the CD back only to 4 days later receive an email saying we returned a cd instead of a movie (we didn’t, we put it in with another movie return as customer service instructed) and they’d be nice enough to send it back to us. 2 days later we had it back and customer service told us just to throw it away to avoid more confusion.

The upside with Blockbuster seems to be, at least here, that if you have movies to be sent back out to be returned and there’s a new release you want, you can go in store and exchange one of your returns for a new release. Sure you have to go into the store to do that but given that we’re having to wait 2-4 weeks through Netflix, if not longer, and we’re new release junkies then Blockbuster is looking more and more appealing.

So good luck islanders, I hope your new choice of vendors allows you to not be pigeon holed into a company where they seem more concerned with quantity than quality.