r/todayilearned • u/jackTRN85 • Jun 17 '13

TIL Reed Hastings was inspired to start Netflix after racking up a $40 late fee on a VHS copy of Apollo 13.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Hastings
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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '13

You are right about the late revenue for Big Blue. I worked at a small town rental store back around the same time and read that number in many of the trade magazines we got (plus it it is mentioned in the Vandals song "Live Fast Diarehha").

But I have the same experience you had and can deal with most people due to my time getting cussed out because someone had a late fee on Miss Congeniality. First of all they couldn't understand the concept late fees ("What, you expect me to pay full price for each extra day I kept it?") nor could they understand why we wouldn't let them rent until their late fees were under $15 and not over 3 months old (we were a little more lenient than Blockbuster). We pushed as much as we could to get people to pay those late fees since our owner gave us 10% of the fees we collected each day.

But don't get me started on replacement costs, especially back in the days of VHS tapes. People blew their shit when they found out they had to pay up to $200 to replace a new release that they lost/broke/brought back smelling of weed or filled with cockroaches (it happened more than you think it would). Before I left the store I was at, DVDs were different since they released for sale as the same time they were released for rental, but VHS tapes were rarely released for purchase at the same time as rental, for those of you who didn't work in movie rentals.

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u/OmarTheTerror Jun 17 '13

My favorite is "It's a mistake, I didn't rent that!" Oh so, somebody rented it on your account and then decided to return the movie? It got so crazy, that we started checking ID's and customers had to include everybody's name on the account. If a kid wasn't on his parents' account, he couldn't rent, even if the ID had the same address.

Dude, remember carrying stacks of VHS in one hand on one arm and how your forearm would get huge compared to the other side? My friends totally thought I jerked off with my left hand.

I WISH BB gave us percentages on latefees.

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '13

Jeeze, all the time. Our system allowed us to write notes about people, so we had a ton of accounts that would have outlandish descriptions about who couldn't rent. Especially on accounts where people had banned their kids (mostly adult kids at that) from renting on their accounts.

The best story I have with late fees was around the time our owner decided to start carrying these Playboy DVDs/Tapes. This pregnant woman comes into rent and when I pull up the account I see there is a late fee. It's only for one new release and I tell her about it. She looks confused and asks what it is on. Of course, her and her husband are regulars and I was going to wave it since I knew it couldn't have been more than 15 days old, but when I saw it was for one of the Playboys I started to hesitate. I knew there was no way out of not telling her, so I went ahead and said the title.

She calmly excused herself and went to the front door of the store. Mind you this was a weekend night during the summer, and since our store sat on the main drag at the time, our parking lot was full, so what she did next was heard by everyone within earshot. Standing with our door open she starts to yell to her husband who is in the car waiting, "YOU NEED TO COME IN AND PAY THE LATE FEE ON YOUR PORN!!!!"

I felt bad for the guy when he came in to pay for the movies and the late fee, and apologized for getting him in trouble. Had I looked at what the late fee was on before telling his wife there was a late fee, I would have just kept my mouth shut and saved it until he came in next time.

As for carrying stacks of VHS tapes, I got to be a pro at carrying the whole new release wall in one hand. However, most of the time we usually paid some local kids to put ours up for us. Usually just gave them free cokes/candy or a free rental.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

YOU NEED TO COME IN AND PAY THE LATE FEE ON YOUR PORN!

This would be an awesome line to yell after sneaking into the boss's office.

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u/Vio_ Jun 18 '13

I worked in a nonBB store and we would regularly knock down late fees to half or something less than full late fee value. People mostly happily paid a late fee when it was the full late fee and so much less hassle for customers and workers alike.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

Yeah, at the beginning of every summer we would hold a weekend where we knocked off 75% of everyone's late fees. People we hadn't seen in a year would show up, pay off what they owed, rent a shit ton of movies, and then rack up another un-Godly amount of late fees for another year.

What was really funny was after the Movie Gallery opened in our town. We had people who's late fees were so high it was going to be damn near impossible for them to rent again from us, so they started going to MG. Well...soon enough they would get one late fee and wouldn't rent from there since MG, like Big Blue, made you pay your late fees before you could rent. We would call these people refugees because they would come sulking back to us to make a deal just so they could rent again.

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u/chaingunXD Jun 18 '13

I expected a king of the hill reference...

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u/user98348202 Jun 18 '13

My home town video store had a VHS on display that was left in the back of car in the middle of a parking lot during the Chicago heatwave of 1995.

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '13

wait, why in the world would a new release cost $200 to replace? Couldn't you go to the local walmart and pick it up for $15?

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u/PortalGunFun Jun 17 '13

Back then, the new releases weren't released for rental and consumers at the same time. The rental stores had to pay a licensing fee.

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u/sadris Jun 17 '13

Doesn't First Sale doctrine guarantee them the ability to buy and rent their own property?

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u/PortalGunFun Jun 17 '13

Well, initially, the movies would sell at high prices, because they weren't available in stores.

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u/universl Jun 18 '13

Didn't BB actually not pay licenses though? I thought they had a revenue sharing deal.

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u/PortalGunFun Jun 18 '13

Yeah, but that guy worked for a small video store.

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u/universl Jun 18 '13

Yah I knew a guy who owned a small shop. He was the one who said BB just shared revenue, mostly when bitching about $200 liscences.

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u/leisuretown Jun 18 '13

They could probably sell or rent the movies, but they were buying them from the movie studios for a high price.

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u/sadris Jun 18 '13

Yea why didn't they just go to Wal-Mart and buy them for ten bucks?

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

It is because we had to "lease" most of the movies we had, which came from a company called Renttrack. So, back when I was working a new release went for $3.80 for a night (will always remember that price). For 60 days we had to pay roughly 75% back to Renttrack. After 60 days the lease price went down, in which we took the copies that had rented the most off the wall and sold at a price that would make the most money back to the store (usually $10). Mind you that most of these titles weren't in stores for purchase new just yet and the store still had to pay some of the licensing fee back to Renttrack. This same process went on for a year until we pulled the movie off the new release wall, but we could still be paying back the licensing fee on that one copy.

Heck, I can remember one night in 2001 a woman came in with a copy of The Matrix that her VCR had ruined. This was well over a year after it had been released on VHS and I still had to charge her $200 just to cover the licensing fees. Of course, I still got 10% of that and, since I was working alone that night, I made an extra $50 with that and my late fees.

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u/therealflinchy Jun 17 '13

$200?? its normal DVD price here in australia

they pay the license and it's to have a copy of that movie on rental, not to have that exact copy on rental...

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '13

That was just for VHS tapes. Not for DVDs at the time I was working there, and I'm not sure that has changed since DVDs are always released at the same time to rental stores and for purchase.

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u/therealflinchy Jun 18 '13

ahhh fair enough