I love movies and have been a customer of Blockbuster’s mail order movie rental service for quite a while. When they introduced their Total Access service where you could exchange your mail order movies for in-store rentals I thought it was a great deal and I knew that the price of $18/month was an introductory offer and would go up.

It increased to $25 a month and recently $35 a month. I felt that was just too much money and so I switched to a less expensive plan with only 5 free movie exchanges a month. Before my switch took effect I tried to find out how they kept track of the free rentals. I sent an email and asked several times at the store. No one knew for sure.

Right after my account changed I tried to get a movie exchange at the store and was told I used all of my free rentals for the month. Since my account had just changed I thought it was a mistake, so I wrote the company. It turns out that free rentals are counted by the calender month and not by your billing date so the free rentals I got on my old plan counted against my new one. Even though I had not used any free exchanges under the new plan.

I wrote them that I tried to find out how this worked and no one could tell me and I thought this was a horrible policy and I was going to blog about. I didn’t get a reply to that one, I guess they don’t care about a small time blogger like me. There’s no chance that someone will pick up on this and it will get passed around the web.

The fact that I tried to find out what the policy was and couldn’t find it anywhere makes me believe that it’s not on their site or is very well hidden. They could have easily offered me a free exchange or two and I would have been fine with that.

I have always been a fan of Blockbuster and have recommended them, but to have them say “Sorry that’s just our policy and you’re screwed for the rest of the month” makes me wonder about keeping my account with them at all.

Read More About Bad Publicity On The Web

.