I'm surprised they haven't been robbed blind by customers who pay the monthly fee and then "forget" to send their movies back.

M.:

Ah, that's the beauty of it; you only get 3 DVDs at a time.

A business that depends on greed for sales (I can watch all the DVDs I want for $20/month!) and laziness for profits (if you're slow enough to return, you're paying $240 a year for 3 DVDs...) seems like a surefire winner.

For me, Netflix is the perfect substitute for cable at half the cost. Any movie I could see on cable when THEY want to show it I instead get to see at MY convenience, without the added cost/complexity of a TIVO. Instead of a few recent hits there are 15000 titles to choose from. Maybe it doesn't have the news channels, but as you might guess I get all my news from the Internet anyway.

For the most part society has gone to hell during my lifetime. Netflix and good American microbrews are the two biggest exceptions.

I live 4 blocks from a Blockbuster and haven't set foot in it for a year after joining Netflix. The only downside is that it is very difficult to get current releases right away, but we really don't care about that.

We keep Blockbuster for the games. Otherwise, it's all Netflix.

I've been a satisfied Netflix customer ever since I got my first DVD-ROM drive back in '01, especially since they opened up their Eastern distribution center in Maryland and cut turnaround times drastically for East Coast customers. Not only are the prices right (if you check out 3 DVD's, a good weekend's viewing, and get them back in the mail promptly, you can get 12 or so DVD's a month - if the mails are prompt!! - at something like $1.67 a disc, much less than half of what Blockbuster or Hollywood charges), but Netflix carries thousands upon thousands of titles that you will _never_ see in either of the two brick-and-mortar mega-chains (classics are a good example; the local Hollywood stores only have about 30 or 40 titles in their classic DVD section; Netflix has thousands and is adding more every week. Go try to find "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" at Hollywood or Blockbuster; it was one of the first titles I checked out from Netflix - and that's just one single, solitary example.)

Further comments:

There are three or four independent (non-H or B) video stores within reasonable driving distance of where I live in Manassas, VA, but none of them has a particularly good classics section (ironically, the Hollywood store nearest my home actually has the largest VHS classics selection in town). There was a big indie video store a bit farther away (in Chantilly, VA) that had a BIG collection, but unfortunately they closed in 2000 (they still have a location in Alexandria but it's too far for me to drive regularly, especially through the DC area's atrocious traffic). As far as _purchasing_ DVD's goes, there are basically four good sources in Northern VA; Borders (best overall selection), Tower Video (good for offbeat titles), Best Buy (lowest prices), and Suncoast Video (strong on anime).