Are You Paying For Services That No Longer Benefit You?

by mzumtaylor on November 6, 2010

My husband and I love movies and good TV shows. Therefore we love our Netflix account with the three DVDs that we get each month and the unlimited movies and TV shows we can watch on the Netflix queue.

We didn’t always use Netflix, however. Three years ago, we had a Blockbuster Online account.

In the Beginning

I don’t remember why we went with Blockbuster Online instead of Netflix originally. I think it might have been because I had a bad experience with Netflix’s free trial offer and was therefore unduly prejudiced against them. In any case, that’s who we chose.

When we first started with Blockbuster, we got three DVDs for $20 a month. A few months after we started, we got an email that said each Blockbuster Online DVD was worth one free rental and you could turn in as many movies a month as you wanted. We would get a movie to watch while our DVD was returned and our online queue was advanced. The free rentals still had a due date, and fines if we didn’t return them right away, but it was still very nice.

It was a beautiful system if you’re a movie buff who has no social life, which perfectly described my husband and I at the time (and possibly still ^_^). We made our way through at least half-a-dozen TV shows and countless movies over the course of about 16 months. We probably got 20 DVDs from the online queue every month, and we turned almost all of them in for free rentals, so 40 DVDs a month, total. Never mind the movies that we bought during Blockbuster’s “4 for $20” DVD sales. You may look at me odd, but I tell you it was awesome.

Then one day we were at our local Blockbuster store, and they informed us that the movies we rented for free were now going to take a place on our queue, so until we returned them, we would not get our next DVD in the mail.

This was frustrating, but it just meant that we didn’t cut it quite so close to the wire on returning the rental DVDs. We adjusted, and everything was fine.

And then they informed us that we could only exchange online DVDs for rentals 5 times a month, and they would still take a place on our queue. This was even more frustrating, and so we decided to go with Netflix, who at this point had the Netflix instant queue, which we could use just like we had originally used the Blockbuster store, but it didn’t involve us leaving our house at all.

What They Did Wrong

Blockbuster’s fundamental assumption when they were making all those frustrating (for us) changes, was that our choices were between getting movies from them for free by exchanging our online rental DVDs, or paying $5 to renting a DVD from them.

In that light, it doesn’t matter what changes they make to the services they offer, because their customers only have one choice, them, or them.

But, they forgot that there was a whole other option out there for DVD rentals, in the form of Netflix, which was then and is now doing everything in its power to make it easier and more convenient for its users to get and watch DVDs.

Blockbuster recently declared bankruptcy. Netflix has never been doing better.

My Question To You

Are there any Blockbuster-Online-like services in your life?

Are there any services you are no longer happy with that you’re still paying for? Or services that you’re no longer using that you’re still paying for?

Common services in this category include things like:

  • Gym memberships
  • Online gaming memberships
  • Online services of any sort
  • Netflix (:P)
  • and so on

They’re not expensive, usually, but the charges do add up.

Example: My husband and I recently discovered that we are still paying for his Xbox Live online account, despite the fact that our Xbox got the Red Ring of Death almost two months ago, and we’ve been waiting until we had a little more cash to send it in. The online service is only $7.99 a month, but at the end of this month that’ll be $16 that we didn’t use but still paid for.

Just one more reason why it’s good to pay attention to where your money is going every month, whether that’s in the form of a budget, or a checkbook register that you balance every month, or mint.com, or whatever system works best for you.

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