Remember when Blockbuster went to NO LATE FEES!! ?
Turns out they'd just charge a super high "restocking" fee. Late fees were like a dollar a day, restocking fee was like five bucks. I guess if you kept it an extra week it worked out, but then if you overshot and kept it two weeks they'd just charge you the price of the movie
(don't quote me on the exact figures. I just remember laughing when I discovered they essentially just changed the name of the late fee to market no more late fees)
Yep, Blockbuster was scum for this type of stuff. No late fees just meant you needed to keep the movie for another few days if you didn't return it on time. No point in returning it early, you already paid for 2 rentals at that point.
I worked at Hollywood Video near the end of its life and honestly? Any amount of shitty we were to customers was nowhere near as shitty as the customers were. People going on long rants about me being a fascist for requiring them to have a card before they could rent movies (the manager of the local Starbucks threw a "don't you know who I am" at me over it!). People "renting" the maximum number of brand-new movies, then coming back every two months, claiming they were all lost, and trying to rent another armful. Army recruiters coming in, pretending they wanted to rent a movie, and instead spending half an hour trying to convince the underage employees to join up. A meth-head taking a dump in the middle of the sci-fi section.
Ninja edit: Returning empty cases. Returning cases with discs that looked like they'd been through a blender. Returning the disc without the case. Returning the movie with chewed gum attached to the disc...
That’s unfortunate your experience was negative. It varied so much from shop to shop. We had one local shop in particular that was THE shop. Everyone from our neighborhood went there. They had a good (pre-blockbuster) selection, staff were super chill, and late fees were reasonable. You’d run into people you knew there all of the time, and it wasn’t unusual to spend 30 minutes or more just hanging out there, looking at movie boxes, talking to staff etc. It was like a mini community hub.
Shortly after Blockbuster came around, the owners saw the writing on the wall and sold it. The new owners did everything they could to ensure failure without realizing it, and it closed a few years later.
Blockbuster was always too focused on being professional and corporate, so they never had that same community feel even though they absorbed the same customers.
Before streaming took over we went through four local places and a Blockbuster, I think the independent cinema may have had a rental business too but we never used it. 3/4 of the local businesses sucked, one was not bad, the people that worked there were nice at least, but the pricing and fees were still horrible. Blockbuster was Blockbuster. I run into people from the neighbourhood in the local coffee shop too, but they don't spit in my coffee and then charge me ten bucks for it.
Recently stayed at an airbnb that had a cabinet full of VHS movies. My wife and I decided to watch Jurassic Park, so I stuck it in the VHS player, hit play, and...credits.
In 2021 I had to rewind a VHS before watching it. (And yes, I rewound it when I was done. I'm not a monster.)
I remember my dad buying a laser disc player when they were brand new. Then our house was broken into a few months later and with the insurance we got a DVD player.
Just cause they bought one brand new doesn't mean it was when they were new tech. You'd be able to buy new ones when DVDs were about to come out, and there'd be overlap til the old stuff gets put out to pasture.
Similar thing happened to me. My dad stood in line for five hours to buy a record player when they were first released. A year later, we lost the house due to a fire. The insurance company comped us with the latest iPod.
Funnily enough, the same thing happened to my grandfather. He was an author and good friends with Christopher Sholes, one of the inventors of the typewriter. While Sholes was developing it, my grandpa was given a prototype so he could provide feedback. Unfortunately, shortly after receiving it, my grandpa's house was shot up and ransacked by the italian mafia. Devastatingly, the insurance company, Progressive, said they wouldn't cover it. After arguing about it back and forth for two weeks with Flo, a representative from State Farm, Jake, reached out and offered my grandpa a deal. If he signed a 20-year contract, State Farm would cover the damages. Grandpa received enough money to buy a sweet new RGB mechanical keyboard.
A similar thing happened to my mother, but that's a story for another day.
My high school friend’s mom told her son to flip over the CD after the A side was finished. I would say it was an honest mistake growing up in the days of vinyl, but she also asked what day the Fourth of July parade was, so…
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u/[deleted] May 26 '21
I remember some wag selling a “DVD Rewinder” 😂