Blown Away by Blockbuster

Apparently I just haven’t rented any movies in a while…

Sara and I went to get a movie last night and ended up picking out a couple of things, plus a game that she wanted to try. How much could three items at the video store be, right?

$18.26, with tax

I don’t think I could ever work at a Blockbuster simply because I could never say something like that to a customer with a straight face. I was pretty verbal at how outrageous I thought it was, and his reply was that, “The game is eight dollars – games are expensive.” From there, I turned to Sara and went into nostalgia mode…

Back in my day, Nintendo games were $2 to rent for a weekend – I know that price well because my parents used to pony up the cash all the time because it was a very cheap way to keep me entertained, and I loved it! They got every penny’s worth out of that two bucks – sometimes Mom would have to bring food in to me because I was so lost in those games. When I got a little older, I learned that video rentals were even cheaper – a buck a night, and eventually it grew to two if we were talking about a “New Release.” I think the highest I ever saw video rentals in Gaylord was $2.50 for new releases, but even that was only when we finally got DVDs … everything else was a dollar or nobody would pay.

We don’t really rent a lot of movies when it all comes down to it because between Tivo and the On-Demand movie channels, there’s pretty much always something we can agree on when we’ve got the time to sit down for an entire movie. Every now and then we’ll order something from Pay-Per-View, which I used to think was bad at $3.95 a movie but apparently now is quite the bargain! Needless to say, this jarred me enough that Blockbuster won’t get another dime from my wallet. I signed us up for Netflix tonight, so I’ll be interested to see how that whole service works – the idea of working at our own pace sounds a lot better than worrying about late fees, and it should only take a few movies to make the $15 / month worthwhile. We’ll see…

(Oddly enough, I just looked up Blockbusters Netflix-like clone and from the outside, it pretty much looks identical – same pricing structure, queue options — everything. In addition, apparently they’ll let you go into a local store to trade something in instead of just returning it via mail and waiting for your next disc to arrive – if I wasn’t already so pissed at the company for gouging me on the last three movies, that would be a nice offer, but at this point we’ll try Netflix just out of spite. I’m sure they’ll do just fine without my money anyways…)