This is the final installation of our head-to-head comparison of the two most popular DVD mail order rental companies. If you missed the first two installments, the entire article can be found on my website.
Customer Service
It would not be fair to rate the two services side-by-side in this category as I only had Blockbuster for two weeks and Netflix for over three years.
I can just say that I did have some interaction with Blockbuster’s customer service and it went fine. They e-mailed me that after I cancelled to say that I had to return my movies in 6 days. I wrote them back saying their contract specifically calls for 10 days and with their slow shipping times, it would be impossible to get them back in six days. They wrote back and said send them back any time I wanted and that would be fine.
I also had one bad disk with Blockbuster, but I could do nothing about it as I had already cancelled my membership when I discovered it.
With Netflix, I have had the occasional bad disk. When you notify them, they immediately send you out a new one of the same DVD without waiting for the bad disk to arrive. Fortunately, I average about one bad disk every five months, so I don’t have much to complain about.
The other day, I asked Netflix to e-mail me my entire list of rentals since I have been a member. One day later it showed up.
While I won’t give an award here for the above-mentioned reasons, I will just say that the Netflix customer service has been nothing short of outstanding.
Miscellaneous
One nice thing that Blockbuster does is that it gives you two free additional rentals each month from one of their brick and mortar stores. For me, that meant a trip to Moses Lake to redeem my coupons. But, I did it one day when I had to go to Moses Lake on other business. Then, my wife returned them as her office is near the Port of Moses Lake.
Conclusions
For me, there is little doubt that Netflix is the superior mail order video rental service. While their price is $3 higher, they can supply you with more movies each month because of the inferior shipping times for Blockbuster. I ran the numbers, and the cost of each Netflix movie is actually significantly less per film than those from Blockbuster because of the turnaround time differences.
Netflix also has far more films truly available to you at any one time. Blockbuster’s service may get better in the future when they build more warehouses, but that may take some time. For now, I will stick with Netflix.
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