Last week, we signed up for Netflix.

Yep, even with such posts as “Why do people sign up for Netflix?” peppering the archives, we at the BFP household signed up for the $8.99 a month plan that lets us borrow one movie at a time, unlimited movies a month, plus unlimited streaming video on demand.

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We don’t use Netflix because we don’t watch a lot of movies but a lot of our friends do. One of the things I notice quite a bit, and something that my friends freely admit, is that my friends don’t watch a lot of movies either and they will have the same movies for weeks at a time.

I recognize that Netflix isn’t about watching as many movies as you can. Part of Netflix’s appeal is in their extensive library of movies, movies you would never be able to find in a Blockbuster store like indies and foreign films. However, if you’re one of the Netflix subscribers who is really into the cost benefit analysis game, there’s a website called FeedFlix that will do all that for you without any additional help. You don’t have to sign up or anything, you just have to paste in one of your RSS feeds into their box and a wealth of personalized usage information appears.

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I don’t understand why people have Netflix subscriptions.

I never rent movies and when I do, I usually turn to the $1 a night RedBox vending machine at my local Giant. For $1.05 (MD sales tax is 5%), I get a recent release that I happened to miss in the theaters (I enjoy going to the movie theater, paying $9, and watching a movie with my girl) and most of the time I can find a coupon online that gives me the rental for free. That being said, I don’t really understand why people sign up for a recurring rental service when something like a RedBox exists (unless it doesn’t in your area). And no, Redbox isn’t paying me. In fact, if you sign up for Netflix through that link above, Netflix is paying me a commission so enjoy my brutal honesty.

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The article I just read was a little dated (Oct 2006) but it highlighted a very interesting service that I think is pretty cool, it’s essentially a rental service for accessories – jewelry, purses, etc. It’s a slightly different take on fractional ownership, most common in planes and yachts where you buy the right to fly a plane or sail a yacht for a specified number of days a year, and is more like Netflix, except for high end accessories.

Bag, Borrow or Steal was started by a couple guys who saw how much time, money, and energy their wives were spending on finding purses and handbags that matched their wardrobe. You pay $10 a month and then a per-item weekly fee but you get to borrow all sorts of stuff. A quick look on their site saw four levels of membership, based on the quality of the goods (Couture, Diva, Princess, Trendsetter) with membership fees ranging from $20/mo to $175/mo.

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What’s better than saving some money? Saving money without really noticing that you’re saving money. How do you do this? Take a look at some of the less important things in your life and see if you can cut back. Or, take a look at some of the things you take for granted and cut back. Or, just trim something you don’t even use much anymore but still pay for… all these things can be removed to save you a little bit of money without you noticing one bit.

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Now, what trumps any of those three options is your local public library but usually the selection is limited to older movies (not the new releases) because that’s usually free (tax dollar supported, but incrementally free) and free is better than paying. But, barring an awesome library system where you get the newest releases…

Many of my friends have a Netflix account and there have been weeks we’re I’ve gone over their houses and the stacks of Netflix movies haven’t even been moved, let alone been watched. That’s the main knock against services like Blockbuster Online and Netflix, if you’re busy and don’t watch movies, then why pay $20 a month to basically hold onto the few movies that you do watch?

That’s me. I know that if I ever signed up for one of those services, and I’ve used their trials, I’d be just like my friends with stacks of movies that might get watched within a week or two of receiving them. Maybe. Do I really want to pay Netflix $4.99 to be able to hold onto one movie a month and borrow a maximum of 2 a month (that’s their latest promotion)? Of course not… not when I can hit up a Red Box vending machine, likely with a Red Box free day movie rental coupon code, and get the movie the day that I want to watch it. If I don’t have a code, it’s a whole dollar!

The only negative is that selection will vary (thought you can check online at Redbox.com) so sometimes if you want a particular movie, you might not be able to get it but that’s hardly a huge price to pay to watch a movie for a buck.

In reading Ed’s post about cutting budgets, I came to realize a budget cutting technique I’ve used but never actually wrote about. The basic idea is that a lot of your needs are actually wants, so how do you objectively separate the two? You can’t and it’s futile to try! So instead of trying to ordain which is which, go through your needs one by one, scale them back or cut them entirely and see how it affects your life.

Take one of Ed’s brief examples: “Is it necessary to have the fastest internet possible? Would a slower speed connection be ok?” Cancel your internet or reduce it to dialup, how is your life truly affected? Personally, I had no internet access for a month when I first moved in and I visited the library quite a bit (it’s within three minutes walking distance, no car involved) but I truly missed having an internet connection at home.

So cancel that Netflix subscription, replace it with some time scouring the internet for Red Box promotional codes and see if it truly impacts your life in any appreciable way.

This has been big news in the DVD movie rental world and it looks like Netflix just got a huge black eye with word of its latest changes to its terms of use. This harmless looking statement was added:

In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service…

What that means is that heavy renters will be penalized. It has gotten so big, it made it’s way to the front page of CNN!

Everytime a Netflix customer rents a movie, it costs Netflix a minimum of 78 cents (postage) and so the ones who rent the fewest represent the greatest profit for the company. Well about two to three years ago, Netflix users began noticing that they were getting fewer and fewer DVDs and that different renters were being treated differently.

Check out www.dvd-rent-test.dreamhost.com and you’ll see someone’s analysis of listed DVD wait times for people in the same family.

So when they say “unlimited” they really mean “unlimited if you don’t push them to the limit.”