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Redbox Raises Its Prices To $1.20 Per Day
nixkuroi writes "Redbox, apparently not having noticed the backlash against Netflix, has decided to charge its customers 20% more per day. Though there will be a discounted grace period for the first day of rental until Nov. 30 2011, the full pricing increase will kick into effect on December 1."
Because: I've never known a single person who uses it.
Maybe Netflix payed them to send people back into the fold?
20% of 1 dollar. Or 20 cents. Less than a quarter.
If anybody expresses outrage over that, I'm going to punch them then make them buy me a tank of gas.
I like backlash. It's good for making investments.
The price of everything else is up 20% in the past few years (other than salaries), so why not Redbox? Netflix raised their base price 60%, and fumbled with Qwickster - different story.
It would be great if the value of the dollar were stable, but it's not, so prices rise. Thanks, Helicopter Ben.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
EOM
Just like with Netflix, I understand there is a cost of doing business. The costs for these companies to pay for content is rising, and the means to deliver it is getting more expensive. I am willing to pay for it until it reaches a price I feel is too high, then I'm free to cancel. Why get angry?
It's a luxury item, if you can't afford it don't do it. That simple.
Redbox realizes that there are few other options and since Netflix has raised prices they can get away with it too because there is nowhere else for customers to go.
They didn't drastic increase their price and did not insult their customers by assuming that they are fucking stupid at the same time.
The closer to amazon rental prices, the less I'll be going to redbox.
What do you mean? They obviously learned that a significant number of customers will take a 60% price increase, so 20% is nothing!
I don't see this as an inflation response, nor is it a fair comparison to Netflix. Redbox is a la carte. You subscribe to nothing. Use it a little, a lot, or not at all.
As they built out their system $1 was a simple price point, easy to advertise and a good entry point. Now they have a business model and usage metrics. $1.20 is a price point that they probably think is sustainable and will generate revenue and profit.
I like Redbox and probably use it 3-5 times a month. It's easy to grab something for the family and just as easy to return to about 10 different boxes within 2 miles of my home and shopping areas.
There is nothing left to do but raise your price. All hail our lord increased profits.
I want everything to be free! Information wants to be free! Music wants to be free! Movies want to be free! Why do these bastards charge us money for Art! Don't they get it? It wants to be free! Since it's digital and can be distributed for nearly zero marginal cost, it should always be free! OK, so you actually rent a physical disk at the supermarket. Big fucking deal! If not free, they should at least never ever raise the price!
Goddamn Luddites! Stuck in the 20th century. Fucking old economy... [mumble mumble, gripe gripe]
Full disclosure: I kept my Netflix account intact in spite of their changes. It's still a convenient bargain with a huge library compared to other sources.
That's not how supply and demand works. Prices are set to what will make the most money, NOT what will cover the costs.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Redbox pricing change and Netflix erstwhile split are not really in the same league.
Netflix customers would have had to pay two membership fees monthly with the new Qwikster arrangement, a 60% increase over the prior setup. The key here is that the "service" that customers were paying for and to which they were accustomed, was being substantially modified - into two new services.
Redbox is simply raising their price, by a marginal $0.20 per rental. For heavy renters, this may be significant over the course of a month. But for most normal renters, this increase is tolerable.
Even at one rental per day, the difference over a month is only $6. If this is too much for you, perhaps you shouldn't be renting 30 DVDs a month.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Yeah, its 20% price increase if you want to cause some outrage among readers. Or if you are more sensible, its just $0.20 cents extra. I am not outraged at this, and in one of their recent surveys I said I wouldn't mind paying a slight increase if it meant more/better movies available to rent. I also see it as a necessity. As a regular Redbox renter, I can't imagine how they stay in business with all the piracy going on and theft. Constantly I rent a movie where someone has returned a fake dvd back just by swapping the barcode label. There have been times as well, where they system says I never returned a movie and would charge me $25 for keeping it past 25 days. A quick call, they see 90% of the time I return my movies on time, and they credit the loss as a system error.
Posted as A/C as I don't have an account yet.
Panic over
Nothing to see, here
From TFA:
"Are you raising prices on Blu-ray Discs and Video Games, too?
No, Blu-ray Discs and Video Games will stay at their current daily rates ($1.50 a day for Blu-ray Discs and $2 a day for games)."
or I actually buy movies, in order to support artists who's income depends on it. Even better, you can go see something in the theater! I don't know what it's like in other areas, but here in NC there's plenty of theaters that show movies a little bit later than others and charge between $1.50 and $3 per person per showing. I'd rather rent new movies than stream old ones. Redbox never has anything I haven't all ready watched. Sometimes I stream random B horror movies and foreign ones on Netflix, but even then the selection is pretty limited.
I have given up on Amazon unless I am really lazy or can't find the movie on Redbox.
Such as any movie first released more than about 18 months ago.
compared to my co-workers I save on the order of about $200/month by kicking pay TV to the curb
What do you do if someone wants to watch live political commentary (e.g. the morning or prime-time lineup of MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News) or live sports? News and sports are the things keeping households in my extended family watching pay TV.
My local library (Baltimore County Public Library) offers new movies for $1 a night. TV series, classic films, foreign films are free.
When Blockbuster opened they were fairly priced but they slowly went up over time until they were expensive. They killed off the mom and pop stores so you didn't have a lot of choice. Then Redbox pulls the ole dumping scheme where you come up with a service so cheap the other guy can't compete. I doubt it's a coincidence that they only started raising prices once Blockbuster was on the rails. Give it a few years and they'll have Blockbuster level pricing without all the nasty selection or overhead. A buck a film wasn't because they were nice people it was a strategy to run Blockbuster out of business. My now dead local blockbuster happens to have a pair of Redbox machines a 100' away in front of a Wallgreens. I doubt the placement was a coincidence either.
It's all a price/value equation ;)
Where I live (SE MI), new movies at Ball$buster are $2.99, and unless you get there when they open, getting a new BD rental is nearly impossible (I'm told stores typically get only 5 BD's). 99cent for everything else. Meanwhile WoW OnDemand is $2.99 for SD, and $5.99 for HD. And now RedBox just got 20cents more
expensive than Ball$buster for older movies. Ohs no.
The choice is going to vary per person. For me, you learn to forget dollars and cents and order the value as "I-don't-have-to-leave-my-cave-for-OnDemand > Redbox-online-says-it-has-it-but-I'm-half-drunk-and-drunk-driving-is-bad-mkay > Ball$Buster-may-or-may-not-have-it > NetFlix-wont-have-it-for-28days-thanks-to-Ball$buster".
Doubly so with a 100" projector screen
The Netflix exodus wasn't just because of the price increase. People understand price increases. It was about the non-chalent contempt that they showed their customers by wording their email "don't you dare complain, the increase is less then the cost of that fancy coffee you're sucking on". The price increase was of course a big factor, but compared to renting at Blockbuster in the 90s, even with the increase Netflix is a steal. The Quickster thing was just icing, the cake was baked and burned.
It was the sort of dumbass move only someone with a job title that abbreviates to a three letter acronym could make. Speaking as the CEO of a small company, I'd say that the brass had their heads so far up their own asses that they honestly couldn't see what was going to happen. My advice: if you're the CEO, you owe it to the company to spend at least 3 hours a day doing customer service or tech support, so that you know what the people you are serving want. Even if you can't give it to them, you know what to shoot for. Otherwise, you can let a singe sentence slide (the latte thing in Netflix case) and ruin a business hundreds or thousands of people have worked tirelessly on.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
AHHHH! OMG!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY RAISED THEIR PRICES!!!
I have been using redbox for 10 years without a price increase, now all the sudden they are going to raise it by 20c?
This is an outrage!! I will never rent another movie from a redbox, and the ones I have right now I am going to smash them and do something really, really satanic to them(to the dvds I mean, to express my uncontrollable rage)!!!
I am also going straight to my facebook page and denouncing their idiocy to the whole world! /makefunofcrazyangrynetflixoutrage-off
many NFL games are on over-the-air TV: the Sunday evening game on NBC, various Sunday afternoon games on CBS and FOX.
Do they often want the Monday night game (ESPN)? Do the local stations tend to not broadcast the Sunday afternoon games they want?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"YouPorn, where the only thing we're raising is your dick."
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Do they often want the Monday night game (ESPN)?
Yes.
Do the local stations tend to not broadcast the Sunday afternoon games they want?
Correct. If you're following the team of the city where you grew up before moving hundreds of miles to a different regional market, or you're following the team to which your favorite player was traded, your team's games might not be available OTA. And at this point I feel the need to mention Saturday games in NCAA FBS. Good luck finding the team of the school from which you graduated or which your college-age child attends OTA.
One of the reasons Redbox gives is "higher debit card fees that went into effect October 1." Anyone find this strange? The debit card fees were actually reduced for merchants, and as far as I know, the only fees were the ones affecting consumers. (a good reference here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204138204576600800330404330.html) Should I guess that RedBox/Coinstar lost a sweet deal they had with a bank and had to raise prices, or are they just shielding their move behind something not many consumers are aware of?
I do believe RedTube has some Red Boxes on it.
They did this where I live several months ago.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The first day will be $1.20. The subsequent days are still $1.00. Moreover, the price for games and blu-rays will remain unchanged. So, their initial charge was raised 20%, but not for everything, and all other pricing aside from the initial day are still the same as well.
That makes no sense. If it was card fraud he should have reported it as such, and the credit card company wouldn't have had a chat with the rental company, they would have reimbursed the amount of the fraud. I agree with GP, it sounds like the guy was at fault and just didn't want to pay up, or he let a friend use his card and the friend lost the disks or maybe he tried to claim it was fraud but Redbox could show a pattern of the guy renting two DVDs every two weeks for the last six months which made it highly unlikely that the very last rental was a fraud and the CC company agreed (my money is on that explanation).
Well, he kinda tried and got the cold shoulder. I inferred that much from reading his post (which I think that's was the idea, to read it.)
Also, don't assume too much who is at fault. You are making a lot of assumptions, but in reality you don't know anything about the case. It could go either way independently of how you imagine the facts to have taken place.
Crap happens. Once I got charged a PPV by Blockbusters, specifically a boxing match with Mayweather (or whatever his name is). I certainly didn't order it since I don't watch boxing (I did order UFC PPV events at the time.) But I specifically know that I didn't order that PPV because I simply don't watch boxing and it was at a time that I just came back to the country, extremely jet-lagged (but with a shitload of work to do regardless). Boxing isn't my interest, specifically when I'm overworked and jet-lagged.
Regardless, Comcast customer service claimed that they had evidence that the order was made from the setbox in my living room. I suggested that fraud/wiretapping of some type occurred, but that didn't go anywhere. I was too tired to continue fighting, and I simply let the payment take place. And I didn't cancel Comcast because I had (and still do) my internet and phone services with them (and I need those to do work.)
Fighting it out and make a fraud report (and fight for it) sometimes is simply not worth it. Let the $50-something to get lost and get back to shit that is more important (and more expensive) at that particular time. Time passes, and then it's months, years and you do not get an incident like that (maybe never again.)
Could something like that happened to the AC with his usage of redbox? Maybe, maybe not, maybe he's lying, maybe he's confused, or maybe he's telling the truth. But I would not imagine it impossible or even unlikely (as something similar happened to me as I just described.) Don't assume online sales/rental/payment systems are infallible, they are not (I've worked on them.) Put on top of that a layer of customer service, typically populated by people who don't give a shit or who think they are at a career dead-end and display it in their behavior, and strange things happen.
On another note, I've been using RedBox for a while, mostly to rent Disney movies for my toddler. Cannot complain about the service itself, and I like the idea of paying per day (and keeping the dvd after paying something close to retail after x number of days... not that I would do that.) I'd be pretty pissed, though, if something like what the AC described were to happen to me.
Man, it will cost them an arm/leg to change all those $1 signs on the kiosks. Otherwise we can all sue for false advertisement...
Redbox tried the $2 rental a while ago, what 1 or 2 years back? They lost so much business they put it back to $1. Added Blu-ray for $1.50, I have no idea how that's going for them. I like renting for a buck from them. I haven't used them much since signing up for Netflix streaming only, unless I really want to see an almost new release, since they have to wait a month to rent them (lame!). Will I spend $1.20 to preview a movie before buying it? Probably. Will I spend it as often? No.
Why not make it a round 1.25? Delays the next raise, and allows you to not get stuck with a useless nickel that will probably get lost.
The extra .20 doesn't matter to me. It's still cheaper than going to a big box store to rent a movie and there's only been once when I didn't the movie returned by the next day.
It is probably more valuable than either its face value, or it's bullion value. Considering that the production rate is 1/year, that makes it as rare as any collector coin that exists -- provided that they date each one properly.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They need to change the dollar to be worth $1.20, and then we could still just pay a dollar.