Scam, or merely a design flaw?
May. 6th, 2012 10:27 amOmaha and I wanted to watch Captain America last night, the new one, before we headed out later this week to see The Avengers. We rented from RedBox, the ubiquitous automatic rental kiosks available everywhere, after using their website to determine where in the neighborhood a non-BluRay version could be found. (You have to admit, that's one hell of a good data tracking management system, to be able to ask nationwide, as a customer, if any one machine anywhere has a given copy of a given disc.)
I say "wanted" because the disk we got has a terrible scratch on it, and was unplayable after about the 1:10 mark. This is right after the scene where Hugo Weaving (poor Hugo! Typecast as a villain forever) [redacted].
We tried playing it in the Playstation 2, then the Lasonic (which will try and play a frozen pizza, that thing's amazing, pity about the heat buildup issue...), and finally out laptops. Not even Handbrake could make it past 1:10.
I called RedBox, and they were very kind about giving me two coupons (no refunds, sigh): one for this film, and one for any other film I wanted. Then she said, "Make sure, if you try and take another copy out, that you take it out before you put this one back, or it will just give you the one you have already tried."
I expressed surprise. "Doesn't it know the disc is unuseable?"
"When we send someone to service the box, if it is present we will take it out. But while it is in the box, it is considered in circulation."
That seems like a very unwise policy to me. They're basically relying on luck and chance to get known broken DVDs out of circulation. It also seems somewhate scammy: I wonder what percentage of people who check out the movie just give up and bring it back, and don't call and complain? Surely, even at minimum wage the ten minutes she spent with me isn't worth the $2.50 RedBox just lost, the bad publicity (Hello!), and the ongoing frustration of other users.
I say "wanted" because the disk we got has a terrible scratch on it, and was unplayable after about the 1:10 mark. This is right after the scene where Hugo Weaving (poor Hugo! Typecast as a villain forever) [redacted].
We tried playing it in the Playstation 2, then the Lasonic (which will try and play a frozen pizza, that thing's amazing, pity about the heat buildup issue...), and finally out laptops. Not even Handbrake could make it past 1:10.
I called RedBox, and they were very kind about giving me two coupons (no refunds, sigh): one for this film, and one for any other film I wanted. Then she said, "Make sure, if you try and take another copy out, that you take it out before you put this one back, or it will just give you the one you have already tried."
I expressed surprise. "Doesn't it know the disc is unuseable?"
"When we send someone to service the box, if it is present we will take it out. But while it is in the box, it is considered in circulation."
That seems like a very unwise policy to me. They're basically relying on luck and chance to get known broken DVDs out of circulation. It also seems somewhate scammy: I wonder what percentage of people who check out the movie just give up and bring it back, and don't call and complain? Surely, even at minimum wage the ten minutes she spent with me isn't worth the $2.50 RedBox just lost, the bad publicity (Hello!), and the ongoing frustration of other users.
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