This post is attracting a lot of visits from people trying to compare Netflix vs. Blockbuster and choose between them. I’m doing the same thing right now.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on the matter, read this post, and then read What I Like About Netflix So Far. I’ll update this post again when I make a decision.

How we get movies at home has been changing for years.

Blockbuster took over home video rental with a national brand and great pricing (99 cents for older movies). They did the innovative thing and came up with a new model to pay the studios a percentage of rental revenue rather than per-tape, and were able to get 50 copies in each store, rather than 2 or 3.

Thus, the mom-and-pops closed up, and their next move was jacking the prices up to $5. Huge late fees. Treating customers badly created a huge opening for a competitor.

Along came Netflix. One low monthly fee. Movies in your mailbox. No late fees. Huge selection. Only issue was that you had to predict what kind of movie you’ll want on a given night, and you had to wait a day or two to get it.

Blockbuster could have avoided this by simply treating customers well. Bad move on their part.

Their response to Netflix was pretty innovative, again. First, they rolled out the same service but gave you two coupons every month for free movies in the store on top of that. This was cool, and I’d probably still be pretty happy if they had stuck with that. Instead, they switched to letting you trade the envelope you got in the mail for a new movie at the store, no charge.

The pricing was good at the beginning — sort of match Netflix, plus you get the in-store benefits. As soon as the business started growing, they went right back to jacking up prices again, and Netflix has still been thriving as a result.

All of this innovation is cool, but to be honest, I still feel sort of stuck as a consumer. Blockbuster is not so much winning my business right now as not losing it. Why?

My wife and I have very different taste in movies. And bless her heart, she has different moods for movies depending on the night. (I do this too, but not as much.) So we’re paying $17 per month for two DVDs at a time, and we never seem to have a movie we want to watch on hand.

Part of this is that we find it hard to predict what we want. The other part is that the queue doesn’t manage our movie choices well. I’d like to be able to have folders to sort the movies we want to see, and be able to select which TYPE of movie we want next for our two-DVDs-at-a-time plan. Like ensuring that I get one of CK’s favorites, and one of mine. Or one each of two particular genres. Neither Blockbuster or Netflix do this, to my knowledge. This could cause me to switch to get it.

The Blockbuster in-store exchange thing is supposed to help with this. But the closest store is 20 minutes away. Not making a special one-hour round trip for a movie…we’ll just watch TV or play cards.

When I pass the store on my way home from some place and think “we don’t have a very good movie at home…I should stop and get something she would like”, I never have one of the movies to trade with me. (See why the coupons worked better? I kept those in the car.) So I either skip it or spend another $5. Which irritates me.

On the flip side, Netflix has the “watch now” feature to stream movies online. The problem is, my Internet connection at home is awful. (If my friendly local Internet service provider is reading this, no offense — I know you’re doing the best you can with what’s available in Colfax, but that’s just the facts. I pay $85/month for 512KBps, and I’ve never actually seen that speed, but that’s a whole different post.) So this feature wouldn’t be much use to me.

Even without the online streaming piece, I could still spend the same amount with Netflix and get 3 DVDs at a time. Maybe that would give me enough variety to fix the problem. But without the folders thing, I’m still thinking I won’t have the right kind of movie on hand. And then I’ll always be spending $5 to get what my sweetie really wants.

Have you ever been a “stuck consumer” like this? Which companies are you loyal to for no reason than that there is no better option?

I’m thinking about trying the Netflix path and seeing if I feel any better about it. A one-month trial would be a lot more enticing than the 2 weeks they offer, though.

UPDATE: @quizwedge tells me Netflix allows multiple queues, sort of like the folders I was talking about above. That does it. I’m going to try Netflix. I’ll let you all know how it goes.