Netflix - your experience?

[chepar]

I've been a Netflix subscriber for about 6 months now. For the first 5 months, I thought Netflix was the best thing since sliced bread. I raved about it to friends and family, watched lots of movies, thought what a great service this was. Well, the honeymoon's over - and so soon, too.

There's a distribution center right in Honolulu, so for the first 5 months of my subscription, the standard was that any movies I mailed back was reported to me as having been received the next morning, and the replacement movies were mailed out that afternoon. I then received the replacement movies the next day. So if I sent a movie back Monday, I had a new one to watch Wednesday.

Over the last month, I've been noticing that they consistently don't report having received returned movies for several days. Then they won't send out a replacement til the next day, with arrival not being until at least 2 or 3 days after that.

I wondered what was going on, so I did a little research on consumer review sites and found numerous reviews from dissatisfied Netflix subscribers basically saying that if Netflix determines you rent "too many" movies, your shipping times get longer and longer. I don't know if that's true or not, but my own experience seems to confirm this.

I'm thinking about finding a different service to subscribe to - but with the Blockbuster service, you still have to go to the store. Yeah, I'm rather lazy - I don't like going to the store. Additionally, being out in the middle of the Pacific, I need a service with a distribution center here for it to be a better option than Netflix.

So what's your experience with Netflix? Is the significant slowdown of shipping something that's happened to you, or is it just me?

 

[MSilvia]

I've never had a problem with them, and I've been a subscriber for a couple of years now. I usually watch about 2 of my three movies in any given week, and usually see my next one in the mail within two days of dropping the last one in the box.

 

[chepar]

hmmm . . . interesting. I wonder if this is a temporary glitch - maybe related to staffing/training or whatever issues at the distribution center.

Up until recently, I've been consistently receiving 4 movies a week (I know, I need to get out more ). The past month I've received 1-2 movies a week.

 

[O2BBubbleFree]

When we were living in Turkey, we used NetFlix and could only get about 3 movies a month...

But that's just what I expected using the APO (military mail service). I was happy with their service.

We quit using them when we moved back to the States, but I just got an email from them last week saying that I may get a free month as part of a class action suit. Some guy is suing them because they didn't live up to their three/week claim, or something like that.

Then again, I may withdrawl from the suit just because I think we have too many people trying to find stupid reasons to sue and get free money.

 

[jonnythan]

I had Netflix for about two years and reliably got second-day receiving and shipping every time.

 

[TwoBitTxn]

I'm on the one at a time program and it works just fine for us. It's still cheeper than blockbuster.

TwoBit

 

[FRUMPY]

We recently experienced the exact same problem you described so we cancelled our membership with them. Maybe their service problems are primarily in Hawaii??

 

[Blackfish]

I've never had a problem with Netflix service. Around Seattle Netflix recieves the movies the day after I send them and I usually have a movie back 3 working days after I send it back US mail---it is pretty remarkable service. Their distribution center is in Tacoma, so they don't have far to go.

 

[ch0ppersrule]

Like FRUMPY said, we started having problems with them in October. We were customers for 2 years with no problems then last month they went to crap. I got a DVD in that was so scratched it would play the same 30 seconds of movie over and over and over and you could not skip it and go on. I reported it that night and send the movie the next morning (our postman comes at 9:30 am). I got an e-mail from Netflix stating they were sending a replacement right away. Two weeks later I finally got that replacement. Well, that still counted as one of my movies and the original movie took 5 days to get to me. So I got screwed with waiting for 1 movie that took almost 3 weeks to get to me. Then the next movie I ordered never showed up and it took almost 2 full weeks to get that replaced. We never experienced that kind of problem. Most months we received 12-17 movies, well in October we received a total of 6 movies. Most of them were shipped from the Honolulu depot also. Hello, I could have drove there in 5 minutes. We did cancel with them. Did you get the e-mail for the class action suit against them?

Melissa

 

[KingViper]

No problems here.