David Thorne strikes again. With moderate success.
I like that he’s a bit of a Robin Hood. Fighting for the everyman. Taking on the corruption inherent in the system.
This time he had some overdue DVDs from Blockbuster.
Read the whole lot here…
He poses a question you’ve no doubt wondered about for years – why are late fees so high…
I have checked pricing at the DVD Warehouse and the cost of replacing your lost movies with new ones is as follows:
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay $7.95
Waterworld $4.95
Journey to the Centre of the Earth $9.95
Logan’s Run $12.95This totals $35.80 so I would rather pay that than the $82 late fee. I have no idea why Logan’s Run is the most expensive of the four movies as it was definitely the worst. Have you seen it? I wouldn’t pay $12.95 for that. I would use the money to buy a good movie instead. Probably something with Steven Seagal in it. The entire premise comprised of living a utopian and carefree lifestyle with only three drawbacks – wearing seventies jumpsuits, living in what looks like a giant shopping centre and not being allowed to live past thirty. This would seem logical though as I would not want a bunch of old people hanging around complaining about their arthritis while I am trying to relax at the shopping centre in my jumpsuit trying not to think about the computer crashing.
Comments
There are reasons for late fees to be as high as they are. For instance, there's a sort of socialism that goes on. Sure, those un-returned movies don't cost as much as their fees. However, some others (new releases or video games for example) would.
Secondly, she's right – not being able to lend out the movies is a real pain. It's irritates other customers and can harm the reputation of the store if someone has to wait 5 + weeks to rent out a movie while the store fights with the recalcitrant borrower to get it back. On a related point, it wastes the valuable time of staff to have to chase things up.
And even if no-one wants specifically and particularly wants the video, it's nice to have it there for the sake of browsers.
But David Thorne is hard to dislike.