Reader Somedaysomehow is annoyed with Netflix. She’s been a loyal customer on the one DVD at a time plan, but lately most of those DVDs have been unplayable. What’s the point of continuing to pay for movies in the mail? All complaining to Netflix gets her are bonus DVDs from her queue….which are unplayable, too.

I’ve been a Netflix customer several years now. I even stuck with them through all the recent drama, and when my membership cost more than doubled. I decided to keep the DVD option, because there are so many movies I still want to see that they just don’t have available on streaming. I keep streaming, despite its poor selection, because I have a one-dvd-at-a-time plan, so there’s some downtime between discs.

My problem is this: Ever since the DVD/streaming split, the disc quality is AWFUL. The last movie I got from them was damaged past the point of being able to finish the disc not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR TIMES. The fifth disc finally played well enough to get through the movie with only minimal skipping and sound problems. Every time I called with a damaged disc, they would send me out an extra one from my queue to try to make up for the inconvenience. Guess what? 3 of those were damaged, too! I just tried to watch the third one, and the last hour of the movie is completely unwatchable.

I don’t know what to do at this point. I appreciate them offering me an extra DVD every time this happens, but I can’t spend my time trying over and over again to get a working DVD I can actually watch. What am I paying them for?

The very important service of mailing non-functional DVDs to your home? Someone has to keep the U.S. Postal Service alive.

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