Jay Dreyer

Blockbuster Shipping Question - Throttling???

Don’t get me wrong, I still like Blockbuster online, but I’m curious about the logistics of their warehousing operations. I’ll try to keep this simple…

When I ship two movies back to Blockbuster, from the same mailbox, they arrive on different days. Say I send both out Tuesday morning. Wednesday morning they will notify me that they have received one of the films. Later that day, they’ll ship out a new one. But what about the other one I mailed? Well, apparently they don’t receive that one until the next day, or even later.

The first time this happened I chalked it up to random effects of the postal service. It’s happened 4 or 5 times since then, however, and it doesn’t seem very random any more. I’m curious if Blockbuster is starting to implement the same type of throttling feature Netflix likes to torture their hard-core customers with.

Anyway, I’d love to learn about their processes and operations. Interesting stuff. If they are having logistic problems, maybe my dad can help them out.

| posted 01/31/2006 05:29 PM