Gamefly Complains of Poor Treatment From USPS

Gamefly, the popular video game rental service that operates through the mail, has filed a complaint with the Postal Regulatory Commission about the high number of games that are lost or stolen in the mail. The complaint (PDF) asserts that the postal service's automated sorting machines have a tendency to break a small percentage of discs, and that preferential treatment is given to DVD rental services like Netflix and Blockbuster. "According to Gamefly's numbers, it mails out 590,000 games and receives 510,000 games back from subscribers a month. The company sees, depending on the mailer, between one and two percent of its games broken in transit. ... Even if you assume the number is one percent, and a game costs $50 to replace, that's an astounding $295,000 a month in lost merchandise. ... That's not the only issue — games are also stolen in transit, which has lead to the arrest of 19 Postal Service employees."

Comments

Re:Dying industry

[BitZtream]

You really should hope they stick around. For all its 'crappiness' USPS isn't THAT bad, and if they disappear it'll get ridiculously expensive to mail a simple letter via UPS/DHL/FedEx/Whoever. Look at the cost to send a normal one page letter via the USPS versus anyone else. Do you want your phone bill to go up $4 every month because it costs them that much to send it to you? And water, electric, cable, ect? You can probably get most of them electronically, but not all and I'd rather keep my money thanks to the USPS charging them a quarter rather than 4 bucks. If UPS charged them 4, they'll raise the bill 6 or 7.

I bet it would cut down on the number of incorrectly addressed items I get. Maybe whoever keeps mailing 'Current Resident' would finally have to get a real business model instead.

Re:wrong

[afabbro]

Look, these threads are the same every time:

• "UPS sucks, but FedEx has been great for me"
• "USPS loses my stuff every day, but UPS is perfect"
• "I used to work for UPS and I would never ship with them"
• "my brother works for FedEx and HE says use USPS"
• "Over here in $COUNTRY our stuff works fine"
• "Oh yeah, I visited $COUNTRY and my postcard to my mother never made it back home and I had to pay two euros to send it"

Etcetera. Look, you open up a public forum and you're going to hear horror stories about each major carrier and stories of wonderful service about each major carrier. Because it's all just a bunch of random personal anecdotes, it doesn't mean anything.

Do a statistically-valid survey of a significant percentage of each major carrier's customers and get back to me.

Re:Dying industry

[chewedtoothpick]

There is nothing which prevents any person from installing a secondary mailbox similar to those used by us in more rural areas for newspapers.

I hate government sponsored monopolies as much as anyone else, but the USPS actually provides a rather critical service even in these days of easily accessible alternatives such as e-mail. Without the pressure of the USPS being able to provide affordable prices for shipping to more poorly covered or less easily accessed areas (such as Alaska and Hawaii) only the people in major metropolitan areas would receive reasonable parcel and letter services. As much as that may not affect you there are still many millions of other people who are equally as valuable and important to you who would be royally bunged if things happened the way you obviously wish.

Re:Heh heh.. riiight

[KDR_11k]

Stolen games run on unmodded consoles.