glad i am not the only one experiencing problems with netflix. i got the same slow-down service over the last 3 months. they are taking longer sending out dvds and receiving them back. 3-5 days turn around on both and there is a distribution center in the city where i live. i also notice the problems when netflix says they are going to ship the next dvd when available. they usually send it out the next day instead of the same day like they use to do when i joined. i will be cancelling my subscription effective within the next couple of weeks. i agree about paying a little extra for the same quality of service i had when i first started. but i am to the point where i am fustrated and i am giving up. case in point.... Netflix received one of my dvds on Monday, next dvd they are sending me is "Garden State" expected on Saturday. that is about 4-5 business days. when in fact i received it today after they sent it out on Tuesday. i think they are trying to create a buffer so that a red flag would be raised if a dvd is returned before or in close proximity to the expected date.

Netflix might as well state 3 dvds a week guideline instead of the unlimited monthly subscription rental for 17.99 because that is what they are doing. limited the number of dvds out per week or month. i usually get 3-4 dvds a week on average when i first started.... i'll be lucky if i get 2-3 now. isnt worth it for 17.99 a month. Netflix will be losing yet another customer.

its getting terrible for me. I sent in two dvds on monday and they still haven't received them yet. I live about 20 minutes from the distribution center. I just joined a month ago and they were super quick during my trial period. i may have to cancel and re-join again because this is getting rediculous.

Mine is also quite terrible. I send back 3 dvds saturday which usually always get in monday morning and now, just one got checked in this morning and rest magically likely will not. Looks like I going to be canceling on 1st.

I'm starting to see some of this also.

Yesterday I had 2 movies credited back in at around 10am, and had two movies listed as "shipping today". Last night I checked up on it and saw both movies listed as "Shipping Friday" :grunt:

There go my plans for seeing Emmanuelle Beart nekid tonight :(

Today For some reason they skipped over the top five discs in my queue even though they were all listed as available now. :(

I've had Bambi as #1 on my que ever since it was released and it still says "Long wait". You'd think they would've expected it to be on alot of members' lists, and would've gotten more than just a couple of copies of it!

I quit my Netflix membership at the end of every billing cycle and restart it once the last outstanding DVD is received by Netflix. Using this technique, my account is always treated with preference -- all the titles in my queue show as available now.

In the last three months I haven't received six discs and Netflix didn't receive two I sent back to them. I doubt this is a Netflix issue and more an issue of someone at the post office stealing discs. Don't know what to do exactly except report the issue to Netflix immediately after a disc goes missing again.

Well after the first 3 months this year it looks like things are taking about 1/2 day extra on avg and I'm getting about 10% fewer DVDs/month as compared to last year (when this came into question I threw my rental history into a spreadsheet to check it out ;)). Annoying but I'm not really sure it's worth getting too worked out about. I think the main problem is the rentals have become "grouped" (so everything gets sent/returned pretty much at the same time) trying to get the new releases every week, so instead of getting a constant stream of DVDs I get them in them in bunches.

The latest/interesting thing I've run into though is "stealth" entries in my queue. For example I put the upcoming 21 DVD WW2 collection into my queue but now nothing beyond #9 is showing. When I try to delete them all and reenter them into the queue I get an error about all the other ones already being in there...

Do you have an Amazon link to that set?

That's really interesting. Does anyone else employ this technique? Does this definitively prove that Netflix/Blockbuster treats newbies with a higher priority status to "reel" them in? And then...gotcha!

With all this Netflix bashing, has anyone directly compared the competitors? Are they any better?

I too am frustrated by service, they still seem to offer the best price/quantity/selection of the DVD-by-mail market.

I cancelled Netflix and went to Blockbuster.
They are not as fast as Netflix was when they were at the top of the game but they are very comparable.
The best thing about them (besides being much cheaper) is the 2 free rentals at the store a month.
So, if a movie I want keeps getting a long wait, I can always try the store.
Even better, if you are a gamer, you can use the coupons on games, which is like a $7 value each.

I agree that Blockbuster is not as good as Netflix used to be, but are pretty comparable to them now. When you consider the lower price and 2 free rentals at the store per month, it seems about equal to me.

You'll get a wait at BBO :(.
I'm seeing reports that 50-75, even 95% of people's queues are in 'Wait.' Mine personally is 52% right now.
My rationalization is that the free rentals are worth 6-13.50 [I usually rent games, which are 6.49 I believe].
But not only am I waiting for BBO to send me titles [somehow, out of 5 S1 tv sets, 3 Disk 1's have been in 'Wait' continually], they're sending me stuff randomly from my queue. Once they ship something, or once I send it back, it gets there and gets checked in quickly [one or two days]. But their inventory and queue management pretty much sucks right now.

i am still experiencing problems with netflix. i returned a dvd at the post office sunday evening expecting the dvd to arrive Tuesday. its thursday and Netflix has yet to receive the dvd. get this i return a dvd they sent me Tuesday, yesterday evening at the post office before they closed and they emailed me informing me that they receive those Dvds back this morning. yet they will ship me next dvds on my queue tomorrow.

just doesnt make sense if i sent a dvd sunday and its thursday, but i send a dvd back yesterday and this morning they received it. keep in mind i have a distribution center in close proximity. something is definitely up with Netflix in receiving and sending out dvds.

I'm not experiencing any problems really with the local Netflix here. My nearest depot is probably 30 iles form me and I still receive them the next day after they ship it, despite the fact that they estimate it to arrive within 2 days of it been shipped, so I'm perfectly fine with that.

I guess the one gripe I have, and I don't know if this is a common one, but they always seem to have a 'long wait' on the more popular new releases. Maybe they just don't have enough copies to meet the demand. I've been waiting for 'Ladder 49' to arrive since it;s release date.

Asides from that, I'm really glad thatI joined.

Here’s a humorous Netflix story.

I send out 2 DVDs in one package on Sunday. We’ll call it package A. Then I send another DVD on Tuesday. We’ll call it package B.

On Wednesday, they receive package B but not package A. They send me out 1 DVD cause they allegedly didn’t get A.

A didn’t arrive till around the next day, with my other 2 titles shipping Friday.

When netflix actually ships, they it arrives after just one day. BUT the time it takes to receive/process/ship is becoming ridiculous! I’m tempted to switch to blockbuster but I doubt it’ll be better.

Exactly. OK my Bourne Supremacy is on day 5 and counting, but usually I get them quickly after they are mailed. It is the long process of getting it mailed that is suddenly cumbersome. I am having like a week turnaround on some items.

if anyone has been getting those e-mails asking them when they received their discs, i would just put the latest date possible. maybe it will help them speed up. who knows though?

I'm an on again off again customer just because I like to try new or free services. Also, my viewing patterns change because I watch movies and tv in batches (after being a tv addict for a month or two, I rebel and only read for a month, etc). I've never had a problem with having to wait for a movie to be sent (no "short wait" "long wait" etc.) but I have noticed that sometimes they get a movie and wait a day to send it to me. I think those really are coming from another distribution center though, because it happens rarely and randomly.

I've also tried Walmart and Blockbuster. Both were much slower than Netflix, and I've rented some movies and tv shows that were only available at Netflix (strangely, one was available for purchase, but not rental at Blockbuster.).

Well, I guess this is where I get to "eat crow" since I have complained numerous times about my Netflix service.

Now it seems that my service is actually getting BETTER!

The week-long wait for Netflix to check in my movies has disappeared and I now tend to get the movies closer to the top of my list rather that deep down into it.

I don't know what's up, but if they're not careful they might actually make me start to recommend them again!

Anyone else notice an uptick in their service?

I have noticed that things seem to bog down a bit in the month or two after Christmas. Maybe lots of people give Netflix subscriptions as gifts or sign up after receiving DVD players as gifts. Anyway, after awhile I suspect that, like those who joing fitness clubs in January, there is a certain amount of attrition. Now I'm back to having good luck in getting new releases like Sideways, A Tale of Two Sisters, 6ixtynin9 and We Need a Vacation.

My Netflix service blows as usual
 

I've had Netflix for a little less than two years. The service fluctuates, going through very, very long periods of suckness. In fact I would have to say that it sucks more often than it doesn't suck. I live in Atlanta where they have a distribution center or whatever they call it. I know from past experience that they get my returns, mailed from my house which is across town from their center, the next day and I receive DVDs mailed from that center the next day. But Mon-Fri I mail returns from a public mailbox near where I work which is one zip code away from their center's zip and the mail is picked up from that box at 9:30am. So returns from there should show up in their PO box even faster than 24 hours.

All that means that, for example, if they send me a DVD on Monday I will get it on Tuesday. If I watch it Tuesday and mail it back on Wednesday they should get it on Thursday and mail out my next DVD which I will receive on Friday. I would drop that one in the mail on Saturday and again on Monday they should ship me another DVD. So I should be able to get six DVDs per week with them. Not since they dropped their price. Around about that time is when my service changed back to sucking.

I'll mail the DVD back and the next day it will finally show that they received it around 11am. Then it will eventually say "shipping" for the new dvd and then finally that afternoon, "shipping tomorrow". Three DVDs are the absolute maximum I can get in one week. This week they sent me two DVDs on Tuesday (having received the returns on Monday) but waited so long to mail out one of them that I only got one on Wednesday, the other will probably be here today (Thursday). I can tell if the DVDs come from the local center by their estimated time of arrival. If it's two days from being sent, it's local and will actually arrive the day after they send it, unless they wait until closing time to mail it like they did this week. If they estimate more than two days then it's coming from some other center and I don't really have any expectations of when it should get here, although I don't think it's ever taken more than 3-4 days.

Anyway, to sum it up, they could do better but don't, obviously to keep costs down which is probably even more critical since they dropped prices. And I'm not going to pay them more money for the 5 DVD deal just to get the same service I should be getting with the 3 DVD plan. I'd switch but there is really no good alternative, especially for me since I prefer foreign or more obscure films. If I didn't know that their service could be better, I would probably be less dissatisfied. For the price, I suppose it's still not a bad deal, just not a particularly good one.

Intellifix (http://www.intelliflix.com/) is another service I recently discovered that looks like they are trying to go head to head with Netflix. Their plan is cheaper ($8.25 a month) and they claim to have more centers and more movies than Netflix. They specifically claim to have "faster shipping than Netflix" and "world's largest selection" of DVDs. But when I typed my zip code into their delivery estimator, it said 2-3 days with next day coming soon. I live in Atlanta lol... A fairly major city. Also I searched for some of the foreign films that I've rented from Netflix and they didn't have a fair number of them. So not ready for prime time in my book but I will be watching them closely. When they are able to meet their claims, I will definitely switch to them and gladly cancel Netflix.

Nope. They still wait an extra day before shipping most of my discs. It really sucks to check your queue at 10:30am and see "shipping tomorrow" on a regular basis.

On the plus side, they occasionally will ship a disc the same day they receive one, and I haven't had a problem getting new releases.