The laws of
human nature have not been repealed. A nationwide epidemic of
missing Napoleon Dynamite DVDs has provided definitive
proof.
In January
2005, Blockbuster thrilled the movie-renting masses by
announcing it would no longer impose late fees for those who
failed to return movies on time.
No late fees!
Sort of like going to the borrow-your-neighbor’s-garden-tools
system. Why worry? If you need to use them, they’ve been in my
garage for seven years. (Oh, when you’re done, can I borrow them
again?)
The promotion,
er, “worked.” Blockbuster rentals went up. At the corporate
level, the no-late-fees policy was hailed as a success. But at
the store level, employees began having conversations that went
something like this:
“Dude?”
“Yeah dude.”
“Why don’t we
have any movies in stock, dude?”
“Dude!
Nobody’s returning the movies, dude. Bogus.”
Nobody was returning the movies, which is
only a problem if you actually need to have the movies
available to rent to the next person. In the pre-no-late-fees
era, the stores would simply keep charging you for every day you
kept the movie, so it was just like someone else came in and
rented it as soon as you returned it (except that they still
didn't have the movies on the shelves).
But now?
Bogus, dude.
“Wait, dude!
We still have our full stock of Gigli!”
“Dude,
Gigli sucks.”
Light bulb. It would appear we have rules
for reasons. You can always find the occasional libertarian who
insists that paying taxes is voluntary. But even they
realize that if they actually tried exercising their imaginary
option not to pay, they’d be reading Atlas Shrugged in
federal prison.
So in recent
months, approximately 150 Blockbuster stores have quietly
resumed charging late fees. So quietly, in fact, that many of
their customers didn’t quite get the message until they got
around to bringing back their movies and learned of the charges
on their account. (There’s something about stapling a notice to
someone’s receipt that seems oddly less effective than just
telling the person.)
Now, lawyers
are involved. Upset customers who didn’t read the notices, but
sure remember what they heard on the no-late-fee commercials,
are bewildered and offended. The same lawyers were also on the
case earlier in the year, when customers who didn’t read the
fine print discovered that “no late fee” didn’t necessarily mean
“no $1.25 restocking fee.”
Some state
attorneys general even came down on Blockbuster for that one.
Now that late fees are returning, it could be the biggest crime
scandal since grocery stores started letting those sticky price
tags fall off their food items – forcing bewildered customers to
read the signs.
It’s not hard
to see why movie rental companies are looking for innovative
ideas. They tried a few years back to eliminate movie return
issues with the Circuit City-originated concept of DivX DVDs –
those silly things that, if you bought a DVD player that could
play them, would just stop working after 48 hours. The public’s
embrace of DivX didn’t even last that long.
Now they face
the advance of download technology, which may soon render the
notion of going out to pick up a DVD as obsolete as the DVD has
rendered VHS.
They need something. But announcing a
no-rules-no-worries policy that you can’t sustain, then making
people mad when you do the inevitable about-face, might not be
the thing. Maybe they could tell people that if they don’t bring
back the movies, they’ll send them a copy of Gigli. That
would motivate me.
