I had the opposite experience at Blockbuster involving a movie I had returned. I dropped it in the basket and went home. You don’t receive a receipt or anything when you bring a movie/game back, you just drop it in the return hole and figure you’re done.

A few weeks later I get this phone call from my local Blockbuster indicating that I would be charged for the movie because it was missing in action. I called to tell them I had returned it. “We don’t have it sir.”

There’s not much I could do, right? Wrong. I demanded they look for it, which they did. Nothing found and the store still planned to charge me for it. Another automated phone call informing me that I was being charged for the movie.

This time something wonderful did happen. I went to the store and asked to speak to the manager that had called me. He was gone, but the assistant agreed to listen to my story. Turns out she had seen the missing movie a few days earlier when another customer had returned it outside of its box. It seems the movie had been separated from its case and was loose in the store. Somehow this other customer had taken it home and that is how it had turned up missing; it had never been checked into my account (Incidentally, he must have gotten a free rental, and somehow still felt compelled to return it).

I was upset at first by the one-sided conversation, but must admit that once I explained the circumstances she knew exactly what had happened and was smart enough to put together the clues.

In the end, the phone calls stopped, the charges were removed, and surprisingly, I haven’t been back. I’m now renting from the local Red Box located next to the Coke machines at Wal-Mart and watching first-run movies for a $1 rental per night. But if I was asked to rate Blockbuster on service, I doubt I would give them the “F” I was considering before an assistant manager agreed to help me solve my mystery.

but I do know one thing: some companies do not care about blogs, they do not monitor blogs, or they have no idea how to monitor them.

Was that the test, by the way?

signed—-GarretT Anderson (SNL)

It really was a nice piece; I have noted that different companies have different monitoring practices and negatives tend to be tracked faster than positives.

Best,
Rich