Very High Demand Status at Blockbuster

If you have checked your Blockbuster Online queue recently, you have probably been surprised to see a lot titles marked as Very High Demand, High Demand, Medium Demand, etc. This seems like something new, but it really is not. The is just Blockbuster's way of putting a positive spin on a bad inventory problem.

The title statuses used to be Very Long Wait, Long Wait, Short Wait, etc., but those terms sound negative. The terms automatically imply there will be a wait, and waiting for DVDs is no fun.

Demand, however, is much more positive. Everybody loves demand. Demand implies desirability, as in "We're terribly sorry, but Disc 3 of Happy Days Season 2 is in Very High Demand. We have only one copy of that disc for the entire country and Gus from Grand Rapids has been hanging on to it for months while he is perfecting his Fonzie impression for the community center talent show."

Don't be misled by the slick change in terms. You are not getting those DVDs that have been sitting at the top of your queue for over a year, because Blockbuster does not have them in sufficient quantities. Blockbuster could buy more copies of those titles, but that would cost them money. As long as you are loyally paying for your subscription each month and not threatening to cancel, why should Blockbuster be concerned with meeting your needs as a customer?

This is the point we all realize the new Blockbuster has already jumped the shark.

Why a Blockbuster Online Subscription May Not Be a Good Value for You

If you are thinking about subscribing to Blockbuster, you may first want to determine if the subscription will provide a good value for you. On paper, a Blockbuster Online (Blockbuster by Mail, Total Access, etc.) subscription looks like an excellent value, but the reality is quite different. Actually, a Blockbuster subscription comes with many hidden pitfalls that dramatically reduce the value. Here are some significant issues you may want to consider before signing on with Blockbuster for one of their various plans.

Few Store Locations
One of the biggest benefits to a Blockbuster Online (Total Access) subscription is being able to exchange by-mail DVDs at stores. With more and more Blockbuster stores closing, many subscribers are being forced to drive longer and longer distances to reach a Blockbuster store. There is no point in spending $10 on gas to pickup or return a DVD that rents for a fraction of that amount. Any Blockbuster store that is not easy for you to reach is a store that is useless to you.

Reduction in Store Hours
The Blockbuster store near you may be reducing its daily business hours. This may be an indicator the store is performing poorly and may be closed in the future, but it also poses an inconvenience. Fewer store hours mean fewer hours for you to pickup and return DVDs,

Insufficient Selection and Quantities of Store DVDs
Once upon a time, you could go to a Blockbuster store at almost any time and find loads of popular titles. Those days are long gone. Blockbuster stores may have loads of DVDs on the shelves, but they are not the titles people want to see. There are plenty of old undesirable titles and bad new straight-to-video titles, but the stock of popular DVDs you might actually want to see is very low, and many of the classic hits are missing from the inventory all together.

Poor Online Availability
Blockbuster's selection of online DVD titles can be a bit limited. Some desirable titles are just not in the inventory. Making matters worse, many titles are in incredibly low supply. If a title has a status of Long Wait, you may have to wait months or years to see it. If a title has a status of Very Long Wait, there is a very good chance you will never see it. Even titles with a Short Wait status may take weeks or months to ship.

Undesirable Queue Shipments
Blockbuster may skip over several Available titles in your queue to ship less desirable titles to you. When this happens, the titles that get passed over are generally newer, more popular titles, and the titles Blockbuster ships are older, less popular titles. Blockbuster must have a philosophy of keeping subscribers busy with unpopular titles while carefully rationing the popular titles. Perhaps Blockbuster intentionally holds back the more desirable titles to ship to its more profitable low-volume subscribers. A more innocent explanation is that Blockbuster is just really bad with inventory management. Regardless, if this happens to you, you may wait weeks to see titles at the top of your queue even though they are marked as Available. The lesson here is: If you don't really want to see a title, you had better keep it out of your queue, because Blockbuster might send it to you when you least expect it.

Shipping Delays
Blockbuster should be able to ship a DVD to you the day after you have an empty slot in the At Home section of your queue, but Blockbuster may not ship when they should. Blockbuster may choose to leave the empty slot open for an extra day or keep a DVD in Processing status overnight. Every time Blockbuster does this, they deprive you of at least one day of your subscription benefits.

Distant Shipping
One of the sleaziest things Blockbuster does is ship DVDs to subscribers from distant shipping centers. If you live in or near a major city, DVDs should normally arrive at your home the day after Blockbuster ships them. If Blockbuster chooses to ship DVDs to you from a city that is hundreds of miles from you, DVDs will take an extra day or two to arrive. Every time Blockbuster does this to you, they reduce the amount of DVDs you can receive during each billing cycle, but, of course, you will be charged full price anyway.

Poor Customer Service
Compounding all of these negative factors is Blockbuster's extremely poor customer service. Blockbuster allows subscribers very few customer service options, and not one of them is sufficient. The toll-free customer service works best, but the hold times can be long sometimes. The customer service-by-email system is good only for ironic entertainment value. The incompetence in this area of Blockbuster is staggering. Your chance of getting a simple problem resolved through email with Blockbuster is about one in four. If you have a complicated problem with your account, you will spend days bouncing emails back and forth with Blockbuster and still not resolve anything.

The Bottom Line
To sum up, depending on your needs and viewing habits, there is a chance a Blockbuster subscription may be a good value for you, but there are many hidden factors that could have a tremendous impact on your ability to use your account and enjoy the benefits you must pay for each month. Before giving Blockbuster your credit card number, carefully consider the negative aspects of a Blockbuster subscription and determine if Blockbuster is prepared to meet your expectations as a consumer and provide you with an acceptable value for your money.

Availability Is Becoming a Liability for Blockbuster Online

One of the biggest problems with Blockbuster Online right now is the issue of poor availability. Many, many titles are simply just not available in sufficient quantities to satisfy subscriber demand. The problem is not just with new releases but with older titles as well.

Add any ten titles to your queue at random, and--depending on your tastes--you are likely to find one or two have a status of Short Wait, one or two have a status of Long Wait, and one or two have a status of Very Long Wait. Even worse, there may be a couple of titles that have a status of On Order or the worst and most dreaded status of all: Unavailable. With all of the availability problems, you will be lucky if half of the titles in your queue have the status of Available.

This situation would not be so bad if it appeared Blockbuster was attempting to correct the problem by beefing up its inventory with more copies of the most wanted titles, but that does not seem to be the case. Titles with wait statuses may sit near the top of your queue for months on end. In some cases, they may never ship.

The silly thing about this is that everyone knows how easy it is to acquire used DVDs. Even somewhat obscure titles are fairly easy to locate on the Internet. Commonly, used copies of most DVDs are readily available for only a few dollars.

Why does Blockbuster not have a buyer who trolls the Internet looking for cheap used copies of DVDs that are in low-supply at the Blockbuster shipping centers? Why does Blockbuster not work out bulk purchasing deals with a few of the larger used DVD dealers who are selling DVDs all over the Internet? Why does Blockbuster not invite its customers to exchange their unwanted DVDs for account credit?

Used DVDs are so easy and cheap to acquire. Why does Blockbuster not want to spend a little money and fix its inventory problems? The issue of poor title availability has got to be irritating a huge portion of Blockbuster Online's subscriber base. What's the point in paying for a Blockbuster subscription when half of the titles you want to see are nearly impossible to get?

Blockbuster Online's Processing Decoy Tactic

It appears Blockbuster Online has begun favoring a particular throttling tactic. This one is the processing decoy tactic. Blockbuster will tie up your queue for an extra day by holding a DVD in Processing status overnight and then canceling shipment of the DVD the following morning. Here is an example of how it works.

1. On Monday morning, you have an empty slot in the At Home section of your Blockbuster Online queue.
2. Later that day, Blockbuster will move one of your most desired DVDs (normally one with an Availability status of Long Wait or Very Long Wait) to the empty slot in the At Home section of your queue. This DVD will be tagged as Processing.
3. The DVD will sit in your queue for the rest of the day and into the night with the status of Processing.
4. The next morning, the DVD will have mysteriously been moved from the At Home section of your queue back down to its original position in your list of desired DVDs. This leaves an empty slot in the At Home section of your queue.
5. Later that day, the empty slot will likely be filled with a different DVD from you queue. That replacement DVD is likely to ship that afternoon.

This throttling tactic is bad for you for two reasons. 1) The delay automatically adds at least one day to your turnaround, reducing the number of DVDs you can receive during the subscription month and thereby reducing the value of your subscription. 2) By holding one of your most desired DVDs in Processing status, Blockbuster is discouraging you from renting that title from another source for at least one day. You will probably not rent a DVD from a Blockbuster store, Redbox, etc. if you believe Blockbuster Online will be shipping that DVD to you in the immediate future.

Blockbuster might think they are being clever with this tactic, but they are only annoying subscribers. We all know Blockbuster Online generally knows whether it can ship a particular DVD or not. Those DVD envelopes and sleeves are barcoded and tracked through their inventory system.  Yes, sometimes returned DVDs arrive damaged or in the wrong sleeves or envelopes, but generally Blockbuster knows what DVDs it has in its shipping centers.  If Blockbuster is going to throttle subscribers, Blockbuster needs to stop playing games and just be straightforward with it.

Come on, Blockbuster, don't be such a tease. Just leave those shipping slots empty until you are satisfied with how much extra money you have milked from the subscribers. Irritating your last few loyal customers is not a good way to pull yourself out of bankruptcy.

Blockbuster’s New DVD Shipping System Will Blow Your Mind

More details have surfaced about Blockbuster’s new DVD shipping system. The full truth is complicated and unbelievable.

The shipping system works on an expanding hierarchy search method. Presumably, every Monday, the shipping software searches the queues of subscribers with open queue slots. The catch is the software looks only at the first three positions (for a three-out plan) on Mondays. If you, the subscriber, have some immediately available titles in the first three positions of your queue, Blockbuster may ship DVDs to you on Monday. If you do not have any immediately available titles in your first three queue positions, Blockbuster may not ship a DVD to you on Monday. (Do not have great expectations for Monday shipping. Monday is not a full and legitimate shipping day at Blockbuster anyway.)

On Tuesdays, the software repeats the same process. The only difference is the software searches the first six positions of your queue for immediately available titles. If you do not have any immediately available titles in the first six positions, no DVDs are likely to ship on Tuesday.

On Wednesdays, the process continues by searching only the first nine positions of your queue. On Thursdays, the software considers the first twelve queue positions. Not until Friday will the software search your entire queue for immediately available titles.

This shipping system is confusing, so here is the breakdown.

Mondays – Only immediately available DVDs from the top three queue positions may ship.

Tuesdays – Only immediately available DVDs from the top six queue positions may ship.

Wednesdays – Only immediately available DVDs from the top nine queue positions may ship.

Thursdays – Only immediately available DVDs from the top twelve queue positions may ship.

Fridays – Any immediately available DVDs in your queue may ship.

This new shipping system is harsh enough, but here is where things get incredibly frustrating. You might think you can beat the system by keeping the first twelve positions of your queue free from titles with statuses of “Short Wait,” “Long Wait,” “Very Long Wait,” etc. Sadly, it is not that easy. Just because Blockbuster designates a title’s status as “Available,” it does not always mean the title is immediately available in your area.

In Blockbuster language, “Available” means the title is in reasonable supply nationwide; however, the status does not indicate availability in your region. For example, you live in Seattle and have Donnie Darko at the top of your Blockbuster Online queue. Donnie Darko may be abundantly available throughout most of the distribution centers in the eastern United States, but there may be no copies of Donnie Darko at distribution centers in your region. In this case, Donnie Darko could still have a status of “Available,” but since Blockbuster does not usually ship DVDs long distances, the DVD will most likely not be shipped to you.

Making matters much worse, if you had Donnie Darko and two other “Available” titles, which are not actually available regionally in the first three positions in your queue, these three titles could prevent shipments from your queue all day Monday, every Monday. If you had six such titles in your first six queue positions, Blockbuster might not ship to you on Mondays or Tuesdays. If you had nine such titles in your first nine queue positions, Blockbuster might not ship to you on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays. If you had twelve such titles in your queue, Blockbuster might not ship a DVD to you until a Friday. Even on Fridays, you have no guarantees.

If you are thinking all of this is ridiculous and makes no sense, you are correct. This shipping system is absolutely ridiculous, and it is not supposed to make sense. The only logical explanation is that Blockbuster has found a way to systematically reduce the number of DVDs it sends to subscribers each week. This incomprehensible shipping system drastically reduces your ability to manage your account and receive your full subscriber benefits. Now that you know more about the system, maybe you can use the information to your advantage or, at least, gain some understanding about why you are not receiving DVDs from Blockbuster as quickly and frequently as you should.

Blockbuster’s New DVD Allocation System Could Leave You High and Dry

According to a Blockbuster employee, Blockbuster Online has recently implemented a new DVD allocation system. Under the new allocation system, subscribers may receive DVDs from any distribution center in the country as opposed to the apparent previous standard of regional distribution. Supposedly, the purpose of the new system is to allow subscribers to gain access to titles which may be in short supply in some regions but available in others.

The surprising aspect of this allocation system is the way DVD availability can dramatically affect shipping times. Monday through Thursday, the new allocation system generally selects titles from only those toward the top of your queue. If none of the titles near the top of your queue are available, Blockbuster will not ship any DVDs to you. Only on Fridays, will Blockbuster Online ship titles which are not high in your queue. Therefore, if the top of your queue is loaded with DVDs which are tagged as anything but “Available,” Blockbuster may not ship a DVD to you until Friday even if you have had empty slots in your queue all week.

This new allocation system is going to be very frustrating for you if you have been waiting months to see titles which are in low supply. You may be able to finally get those titles, but they could come from almost anywhere in the country and take a long time to arrive. Also, their presence at the top of your queue could tie up shipping on your account for days at a time.

The best way to beat the new allocation system is to keep a few Available titles at the top of your queue Monday morning through Thursday afternoon. At the end of the day on Thursday, move the titles with waits back to the top of your queue or just arrange your queue to reflect your actual wishes. Rearranging your queue twice per week will be a headache, but it appears this is the best way to work the system in your favor until things change.