Wednesday, September 21, 2011

On Price Raises and Stupid Names

I really, really like blogs and Twitter feeds. At one point, I had so many blogs on my Google Reader that I was sometimes getting a thousand new items a day. I called a lot of them and I'm gradually adding them back, making cuts as needed to keep things manageable. Today, I only had 76 new items.

Since I usually subscribe to multiple blogs in each of my areas of interest, I frequently see that same story posted multiple times. That makes sense and it's fine, although it sometimes gets annoying when an items that is news (like Verizon getting iPhones) merits a post in nearly every blog I read, especially over multiple posts on the same blog over several days and even moreso when an item is not only big news in a certain field, but gets mainstream news coverage as well.

Enter Netflix.

As most people know, Netflix announced in July that it would be separating DVD rent and streaming and would start charging $7.99 each. Previously, one-DVD-out with streaming was $9.99 (raised from $8.99 in November 2010) and streaming only was $7.99. What this meant for customers that wanted both streaming and DVDs was that they would go from paying $9.99 to $15.99. That meant a 60% price increase.

Predictably, a lot of customers cried foul. I use Netflix primarily for streaming, so I had only taken advantage of the DVD service a few times. I decided to switch to streaming only, which meant that I'll actually save a dollar due to the price changes, since it's forcing me to make an active choice and not pay an extra $12 per year for DVD insurance. ("Oh, I never get DVDs, but what if I really want to watch something that isn't streaming?") However, while a Netflix price increase made sense, anyone should have been able to predict that such a drastic increase would upset customers. I don't understand why they didn't raise it gradually over a longer period of time. Or offer a bundled rate with at least some discount for getting both.

Because this, customers were outraged, subscriptions were canceled, and blogs were flooded with commentary. Fortunately, a few amusing things came out of it, like First World Problem of the Day with Jason Alexander.

September finally rolled around, prices increased, and somehow the world didn't end. Instead of breathing a sigh of relief, Netflix's CEO decided to capitalize on the dearth of satisfied customers by making a blog post and a video that not only offered a non-apology apology, but also announced that the DVD rental side of Netflix would become Qwikster, which feature a separate website (including separate queues), separate credit card billing, but would keep the red envelope...which I'm pretty sure no one cared about at all.

Once again, there was plenty of snark regarding the decision, such as Landline's great parody video of Blockbuster's decision to split popcorn sales and DVD rentals and this comic by Brad Colbow.

Unfortunately, there's been a lot of serious coverage, too. Basically, a company that was pretty good made a really poor decision on pricing, then decided to make an even worse decision about splitting operations and using a really bad name. Oh, and did I mention that they don't even have the @Qwikster Twitter account? Turns out that their lack appreciation of creative spelling is shared by someone with a penchant for a pot smoking Elmo. (He's since changed his Twitter picture at least.)

To make a long story short, I'm just at a loss as to why so many people are taking this seriously. I understand being annoyed at the sudden and drastic price increase, but at this point, it's stopped being annoying or even mildly frustrating and started being downright hysterical. And really, given all the problems today, don't we all need to embrace humor wherever we find it? Even if it's just the schadenfreude of knowing that the leaders of a major company are capable of levels stupidity that most of us couldn't approach if we tried.

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