Friday, February 4, 2011

Reason # 1977832 that I love Netflix

I've been a subscriber to Netflix since June 2007. This week I received my 500th disc through the mail. (FYI - it was "The Expendables" but I wish it were something more high brow to impress you.) I am a huge fan of Netflix and I have probably been responsible for at least a dozen people signing up, including my parents who joined last year.
I thought I knew all about Netflix, but by accident I learned something new last month. I always thought that if you place something that was on a short or a long wait at the top of your queue then you wouldn't receive any more movies until you were reached the top of a secondary queue for that specific movie. It probably would be that way if Netflix were run by Blockbuster. But thankfully for us the hard-working consumer they aren't. Instead of not receiving a movie at all, they skip to the next available movie on your queue and then, when the movie that had a wait time becomes available they send it to you whether or not you already have your maximum amount of movies checked out.  How awesome is that!?
So many businesses fall into the "we're the supplier so we call the shots" mentality that you are amazed when you come across a business that totally understands the consumer perspective.
The other consumer-friendly practice Netflix has is they send out emails to the tune of "hey, was the picture on that movie you watched last night kind of crappy? We think it was because our engineers noticed high demand so our quality suffered. If it was, click here and we'll refund part of your bill." Awesome.
They totally have me. I get so much consumer surplus, that is the amount of extra joy I get from not paying what I would, that if they doubled the price I wouldn't think about canceling my subscription.

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