Hollywood Video - customer beware!

My family rents videos to watch together on occasion. Usually we go through Netflix, but sometimes we'll hit one of the local rental stores. Recently, we got four DVDs from Hollywood Video, watched them, and returned them. We all -know- we returned them. Everyone gathered them up together and sent them off with my dad. He did nothing else on the trip; it was solely to return the DVDs. He put them in the outside bin, and that should have been that.

About a month later, we got a bill in the mail, charging ridiculously high late fees as well as demanding payment to replace those four videos. Hollywood Video was claiming that we never returned the disks. We called to dispute. The employee we dealt with first at least tried to be helpful, suggesting that the returned videos may have been lost in the bin. However, no one at the store seemed able to track down the missing videos, and the bill kept growing. We had no reassurance that anyone was even actually checking on our behalf. Further attempts to seek help, or resolve the issue, met with blunt rudeness and accusation. One employee we dealt with went so far as to list possible (and very insulting) reasons we would have had to steal the videos, while claiming that their people couldn't have any motivation to do so, "since they get free rentals." Uh-huh. In short, with the exception of the first person we talked to only, our dispute was handled in a completely antagonistic manner.

We had little recourse. The disks were long out of our hands, and Hollywood Video had a database that laid the blame on us. It was our word verses theirs, and the fact that many people -do- try to scam the video place had us cast in the light of "guilty until proven innocent," in their eyes.

Eventually, we were able to settle the matter by paying the replacement price on the disks themselves, with the stacked late fees waived. However, that was still $50 we did not rightfully owe.

No matter how the disks were actually lost, (and they -were- lost some point -after- we returned them to the store,) this incident proved two things to me. One: that Hollywood Video has nothing built into their returns system to protect the customer from potential system or employee error, and Two: they don't care.

I won't deal with any company that has an antagonistic attitude towards customers, especially when they have the power to levy fees. That's a stupid way to run a business, and any customers who decide to deal with them are putting themselves at risk.

It doesn't matter what percent of an erroneous fee a company offers to waive. If this is how they do business, I will not be doing business with them again. I encourage everyone else to be wary, at least until Hollywood Video can prove it actually -cares- about its customers.

Hollywood Video, you need to figure out a better way to run. From now on, I'm sticking with Netflix.