Stay away from Netflix

[Freon]

So I'm about to be screwed hard by Netflix. I can see it coming. But better to get it over with now than get it harder later.

I'll give a brief history here.

In early October I decided to give Netflix a shot. Silly me, I thought the 2 week trial would actually be enough time to check it out. Problem number one crops up. They ship the DVDs to my billing address, not my shipping address. Did their website say there would be a problem with a separate shipping and billing address? No. Afterall they let you separate the two.

So 2 weeks pass, I hadn't gotten my DVDs and they start billing my credit card. I emailed them (good luck finding a phone number) and after a bit of bitching and moaning they cancel the charge. I finally get my DVDs forwarded to my correct address and get the shipping address fixed.

About late December the service quality started to trail off. They started implementing better excuses to be lax about sending out DVDs. Here's the rub. They've managed to cram about 5 extra days into their turn around time.

The first day or two gets crammed in before they receive a DVD back. Either that or US Postal Mail suddenly got 1 or 2 days slower (from 2-3 to 4-5), or Netflix isn't exactly being speeding about receiving. The next day is crammed into their new "choosing next movie to send" BS. Basically it takes a whole day for them to figure out which movie from my queue that they will commit to send me. Guess what happens the next day? The send queue is updated, but it doesn't say "shipped," it says "released to ship." Finally the DVD is shipped after yet another day passes. Now, I'm dying to know why none of this happened when I started the service. And it was funny watching them slowly add all these extra little waits in. First it was receiving was a bit slower, then they added the "released to ship" status, then they decided it takes a whole day to figure out which movie to move from my queue to shipping, then somehow US Postal mail slowed down.

The first full month I had the service I got over 10 DVDs through the standard three DVD plan. That's a turn around about every 10 days. 3-4 days to ship, ONE day to receive and ship back out my next title, another 3-4 days to ship back out, and a few days to watch it.

Now it takes 4-5 days shipping each way, 2-3 days of their BS'ing around with the queues. I'm lucky to rent 6 DVDs for my $21.95 (with tax). And that is only if I watch the movies within 2 days.

So here I am. Currently I have three movies, two of which I should've received on the 6th, another on the 8th. They're not here. So what can I do? I already know they're going to screw me on them and probably charge me $30 a piece. I decided to go ahead and immediately cancel the service for now, but I'm sure I'm in for it now.

I'll fight it, because it sure as hell isn't my fault Netflix has gone down the crapper, nor is it my fault if the postman decided to play sticky fingers (it is THEIR business model to rely on postal mail). I will be pursuing a fraud complaint if they do decide to screw me.

I'll post again when they decide to charge my credit card $90. For now I would suggest anyone using the service to consider dropping it before they decide to make $30 per "lost" DVD off you.

[JPR]

Sorry to hear about your problems but i think you are in the minority when it comes to not liking their service.

[modena]

Actually we have had a similar problem here. We, a few friends of mine and myself, joined Redoctance.com, a consule game renting place, like netflix. Everything about them is fine, except for one thing....If they dont have the games you want in your queue, you may wait up to 3 weeks for them. So you pay for 3 weeks and you dont have a game. And you might say, rent something else. That is a problem as well, b/c if you rent 2 games (the max) and something you want comes in, they send it to someone else. Only rent one....still you might wait 20 days for the other one you really want, and still you arent getting your $25 or whatever worth. A friend of mine has had similar problems with netflix, they dont stock enough of the new and good stuff!

[MJordanash]

Hope you get everything worked out. Havent heard of any problems with them so far.

[Jenny]

I kinda had the same thing, but when I sent the 2 dvds back, my cc was immediately credited, so it turned out to be no big deal. I cancelled. :) lol

[styleee]

netfilx used to be good, then it turned to crapola.

but my roomate used to always click the "lost in the mail" button so we would get another dvd faster. and as soon as they got that one, we would click it again.

it did speed up the process a little. but the novelty fell off when we stopped watching the movies and had the same bad dvds sitting there for 3 weeks before deciding to send it back.

so we cancelled

[adowding]

I had the same problem with netflix. They took 10 business days to get it to me. Screw that.

[AaronNa]

I agree about Netflix being garbage. I was one a member back when it first started. It was great back then, I would average 6 movies per week!

Then they dropped the number of movies a person could have out.

Then they slowed their response time down so it would take more than 2 weeks from the time they shipped the movie, me watching it and mailing it back the same day, until the time they "received" it.

Then they started jacking up the prices (and charging tax to every state).

Then they started giving the old "out of stock" message on every moive I wanted to see. Check this out: after leaving an out-of-stock movie in my queue for a month, I got an e-mail of "movie ___ has been out of stock for a long time, we recommend removing it from your queue". Ha what a joke. I finally had enough and canceled.


My advice: go to Blockbuster. Locally (in Seattle area) they have a deal for $30 you get to rent 1 dvd per day for 30 days.