Netflix cracked DVD replacment not all it cracked up to be
General January 13th, 2006
A week ago, Undergrads: Freshman Season Disc 2 shifted up to the top of my Netflix queue, and it was mailed to me. I loaded it into the player, really looking forward to continuing the series. Sadly, my player wouldn’t play it. It popped a “DISC IS DIRTY” message up on the screen. Now, it’s not uncommon for rental DVDs to be scratched – and my player isn’t the most tolerant when it comes to poor conditioned DVDs – but I’d never gotten an error message on the TV before.
When I looked at the disc, it wasn’t scratched, it was cracked/creased radially. The crack didn’t go all the way through the DVD, which explains why I didn’t see it when I loaded in the player. The top/inked/labeled side looked fine, but when you flipped it over you saw a crack all the way through to the ink. The disc has a certainly ‘flexibility’ that non-cracked discs did not.
Netflix has a feature that if you receive the wrong disc or a broken one, you can go online and report it and they’ll instantly mail you out a new one. This circumvents the normal mail-it-back, get-the-next-one procedure (and saves you from having re-add the movie to your queue.) I did this last Thursday, and popped the DVD in the mail on Friday. Netflix acknowledged the request and said they would send one out shortly.
Monday, I get the normal “this disc has been received” email from them – but still no replacement DVD. No confirmation from them that they’ve mailed my replacement DVD. Tuesday, I get an email saying I should expect it on Thursday. (Normally it’s next day, but my guess is it’s being shipped from a different, further away distribution center.) Thursday comes and goes and no replacement movie.
It’s disappointing that this is taking longer to receive/replace than a normal movie in my queue. I’d like to think of it not that Netflix is dropping the ball, or not living up to expectations, (although to be fair, they are) but rather me having eclectic tastes and Netflix not having a quick enough contingency plan when the normal scenario goes bad.
Maybe it will finally get delivered today, guy.
[ Edit 1/16/06: The DVD arrived on Saturday, 10 days after I reported it broken and 5 days after they acknowledged receiving the broken disc. It mailed from Santa Ana, CA which I guess explains some of the delay. I finished watching it yesterday, and will mail it out tomorrow. I wish they would make an Undergrads: Sophomore season! ]
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Maybe Netflix is growing so rapidly with it’s advertising and word of mouth that they can’t keep up with the demand/requests, or such hugely popular shows like Undergrads. *blink*
Or maybe it’s what you said.
“Math!”
I’ve gotten lots of broken discs and Netflix replaced them without skipping a beat. Actually, the first thing I do when I get a DVD is open up the envelope and make sure the disc is intact.
I also report DVDs lost all of the time. Damn postal service…
The worst was when I rented “Casablanca” and there was shit on the DVD that made it stop playing at the plane scene. I ran around my house screaming for about an hour when I realized I wouldn’t find out if Ingrid Bergman got on the plane for days. I think it took Netflix about 5 days to replace the disc, but this was in 2002 before there were service centers everywhere, plus I lived in the sticks (but at least on the same continent).
You can report discs missing if they’ve been en route either way for a week. However, it sometimes creates a backup on your queue because you’ve got several copies of the same thing in the infinite blackness of postal transit, and you can’t get the different things that top your queue.