A week and a half ago I wrote a review for Redbox DVD rentals and free promo codes, the review was fairly honest, yet I was a very new customer at the time. Over the last ten days, I’ve rented about a half dozen movies, all with help from the codes in that article, costing me nothing more than gas money and time to go get them. While this is all well and good, I have had two negative experiences with Redbox thus far.

  • Scratched DVD
  • Scratched DVD

The first time it happened was a day after I published the old article. Wend and got a movie around 11.30 at night, came home and started to watch it. Six minutes in, it skipped and then froze. After getting the disk out of my DVD player I noticed a large scratch on the bottom. This was a pretty deep scratch, one that my fingernail got caught on, cleaning was not going to help. The Redbox case has instructions on the proper way to clean a DVD, nothing was going to help this thing though, but they did have their toll free number on it. What the hell, it’s only midnight, lets see if anyone is answering the phones.

Sure as shit, within 15 seconds of dialing I had a customer care specialist on the phone. I explained the situation to her and she apologized and asked for the barcode number on the disk. After reading it, she confirmed the disk I rented and the location I got it from. A few seconds later, she apologized again and offered to give me a promo code to rent another movie. She followed this up with the caveat

If you are going to rent the same movie as you have now, rent it first with the promo code and then return the scratched one to ensure you don’t get it again.

This kind of bothered me, is there no way to stop it from pulling the scratched disk? In any event, I drove back, got another movie and all was good, but the total conversation was less than three minutes and overall a very good experience, as good as customer service calls can be I guess.

The second instance happened night before last. I returned movies that I had out and rented another one, again with a free promo code. Got it home and made it 17 minutes in before it too started to skip and then freeze. Looking at the bottom, this was scratched just as bad, even on the top of the disk. Once again I called the toll free number, explained the situation and added that this is the second time in a week it has happened to me. This customer service specialist responded with

I understand and apologize for the inconvenience, I’d like to give you a promo code for the scratched movie and want to let you know that I’m putting a note in that it is to be pulled. We have service people checking the machines every few days and this will get pulled out at that point. I’d also like to give you a second promo code for another movie for the inconvenience.

Now mind you, this is all after a 30 second conversation. Clearly this must happen often if they are willing to give out promo codes that easily, or they are hoping you’ll keep it for more than a day. Either way, I am more than happy with the speed, courtesy and overall experience with Redbox. all that warm and fuzzy stuff aside, if I continue to get scratched disks once a week, it won’t be worth my time driving back and forth, I’ll just look into NetFlix.

Similar articles that might also interest you: