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Netflix Woes Mean a Gap In Shipments
Loopback writes "It appears that I'm not the only one waiting for my NetFlix movies. It seems they are being bitten in the rear by their home-grown proprietary inventory management system. 'Netflix has been facing shipping delays and outages in its distribution centers for the last two days and is fumbling to find a fix. The tab is roughly $1.8 million to $3.6 million in revenue a day.'"
I shipped back two DVDs on Tuesday then got the notice they were received on Wednesday. Today (Thursday) I got the notice from Netflix that shipments might be delayed, but I also received two DVDs in the mail (the correct DVDs that were next in my queue). What I did not get was the normal notice from Netflix that they had shipped me anything.
They're even cooler than just that.
I've been using them a long time with the 3 disk unlimited plan. One day my girl broke a dvd. Her response: "Let's just mark it as never arrived."
Being all into personal accountability and shit I told her "no, we'll say we broke it and pay for it. We did in fact break it."
Their response: "Do you want us to send a replacement?"
No charge for disk. Nothing. I guess if you don't abuse the shit they overlook the occasional accident.
One or two of them actually re-appeared later, not sure if they were found in the back of a truck or if Netflix lost them.
There have been a couple instances now where postal workers were investigated and found to have stolen hundreds of random DVDs from their routes. I also heard of one instance where kids were going through the mailboxes in a neighborhood. Since these incidents are detected, I suspect NetFlix and the post office share data about who loses DVDs and what postal worker's route they are on.
Actually, how long before they offer a discount if you opt into a "direct handoff" network? When you return a movie, instead of shipping it back to netflix, you print out a label for the next member and slap it on the mailer.
Sure, there's a ton of problems, but it could cut their overhead by up to 60%: they spend half as much on postage and the disks are in flight for one day instead of two each transaction. The savings aren't so much in postage as in inventory reduction: for a popular movie that stays out two days at a time, you cut the postal overhead from 50% to 33%.