Awake

I'm awake, so I may as well post.

Arial and I have been talking about the Blockbuster lawsuit that was just settled. The lawsuit claimed that the "No more late fees" ad campaign was illegal since you can't keep the movies that you rent forever.

Basically, the suit was brought by an idiot too stupid to know that they are proclaiming to the world "I don't understand how business works! I'm dumb!"

The first thing that we did when we heard about the "No more late fees" thing was to grab a pamphlet to see how it worked. If you don't know, it works something like this (I'm working from memory so it might not be exactly right): You get a week grace period after the due date to return the movie. If you don't, they charge your credit card the price of the movie. If you bring it back within a month (or a week or something), they will take the charge off the card but charge you a restocking fee. Otherwise, you now own it.

We were happy about this because we can manage to bring a movie back in a week. Before this whole thing, we would get hit with late fees for returning movies minutes after noon on the due date. But not anymore. It was great.

But then someone had to ruin it for the rest of us.

They are now offering refunds to people who were charged a restocking fee. We think that in order for people to get the money back they should be required to stand on a chair in the middle of the store and yell "My stupidity has become so debilitating that I can't read a pamphlet!"

Just a thought.

mwz
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