Although recent headlines have touted that “Blockbuster is dropping late fees,” if you read the details, it seems like this new scheme is not so much a means to compete with companies like Netflix, but rather a new way of extorting money from consumers:
The world’s largest video rental company will still have due dates for their rental products – one week for games and two days or one week for movies, depending on whether it’s a new release.
But customers will be given a one-week grace period after that to return the product. After that grace period ends, the chain will automatically sell them the product, less the rental fee. If the customers don’t want to purchase the movie or game, they can return the product within 30 days for a credit, less a restocking fee.
As Boing Boing points out, this is a total crock:
Restocking fees are usually put in place by electronic retailers to deter returns on big ticket items that are not defective. If you buy something and then return it, the company has to deal with more costs to handle the return. But Blockbuster’s entire business is based on returns! It doesn’t sell movies, it rents them to you with the expectation of getting it back. Their business model hasn’t changed any. It’s just a way to extort more money out of us consumers.
Although the grace period of another week will probably be a nice feature for most consumers, I hope people realize that the penalty after that period expires could be worse than if you had kept the rental for that long under the original Blockbuster agreement (although at least you get to keep the movie).
For my money, Netflix is still the easiest and most cost-effective way to rent movies: you get a selection far better than any video store, you keep the movies for as long as you want, they’re delivered to your door in a couple of days, and return shipping is free. However, because of the flat monthly fee, I’ll admit that if you don’t rent a certain amount of videos a month then it might not be for you.
A couple of months ago, I mentioned that the Mozilla Foundation was collecting donations in order to buy a two-page ad in The New York Times commemorating the release of Firefox 1.0 that would include the name of every person that donated. After two months and 10,000 people, the ad ran in yesterday’s edition. MozillaZine has some more details about the ad, as does Mozilla.org, which also offers a PNG image and a high resolution PDF for download. If you look closely, you can find me (Andrew Chorney) in there. 🙂
The BBC reports that “The 
