I've been a member of netflix.com since November. I was fairly happy with their service in the beginning, but as time went on the quality of their service has deteriorated gradually.
They simply do not deliver what they promise!
Here are some examples:
In the beginning, they used to process shipments quite quickly. When they received a movie back from me, they would ship a new one the same day. Now there is a usual delay of 1-2 days between the receipt of the movie from me and the shipment of a new movie. This is when the status says "available now."
I'm beginning to suspect that they have a sophisticated database tracking system that does the following:
1. For the new members, the shipment gets a higher priority. As time goes on, they downgrade the shipment of existing members so that they can give good "first impression" to the new members. It may be an effective marketing gimmick for some, but an unethical one.
2. Customers are profiled by how many movies they rent per given period. If a customer gets too many movies, they get a low shipment priority. This may explain the usual, mysterious delays between the receipt and the shipment of DVDs. This makes sense because they already got paid flat fees from customers. The only cost they can control at this point is the number of shipment of the DVDs. The less DVDs they ship out, the less money they spend on postage.
All popular new release and most popular titles have "short wait" to "very long wait" status, meaning I have to wait up to 4 months to get a movie. This is an outrage. I have a list of about 30 movies in my queue. All the new release or popular classics are in "wait" status. As a result, I end up getting movies that are either flops or some esoteric foreign movies.incidentally, these movies are widely available at a local public library at no charge with no waiting list (since they're not very popular). So what's the point of getting those unpopular movies from netflix when I can get them from the local library?
In summary, netflix.com does not deliver!!
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