When did Netflix expand…

their busi­ness week to include Saturday?

Has any­one else noticed that recently Net­flix is send­ing out notices of receipt and ship­ping out discs on Saturday?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled.  I’ve long felt that the weak­est point in Netflix’s ser­vice model was the fact that it didn’t con­duct busi­ness on Sat­ur­day.  After all, we get mail ser­vice on Sat­ur­day — well, at least for a lit­tle while longer.  Pre­vi­ously, if you didn’t time your disc mail­ing just so, that two-day week­end could make a big dif­fer­ence as to how many discs a per­son received over the course of a month.

And the sub­ject of Net­flix actu­ally relates to my blog in that ear­lier this month I down­graded our sub­scrip­tion level from 3-at-a-time Unlim­ited to 1-at-a-time Unlim­ited.  Now that both kids are in school all day, there was no way to jus­tify the higher sub­scrip­tion level.  Of course, 2-at-a-time would be bet­ter but I went to the low­est Unlim­ited level to make The Hus­band happy.

Prob­lem is that lately he’s been doing more “research” and find­ing HBO shows that he wants to watch.  First we went through the all four sea­sons of The Wire.  An excel­lent show, by the way, though a lit­tle raw and very much not appro­pri­ate for kids or even teens.  But just about the high­est qual­ity show with the most incred­i­ble act­ing I’ve ever seen.  Then he dis­cov­ered HBO’s Oz.  It’s not as good but still okay.  He loves it; I watch it to keep him com­pany and because it’s kind of like a train wreck — you don’t really want to see it but you can’t help yourself.

But when one mem­ber of the fam­ily hogs the queue with a par­tic­u­lar series and you only get one disc at a time, there’s not a lot of room for other mem­bers of the fam­ily to explore other watch­ing inter­ests — namely me.  I’ve been enjoy­ing PBS’s Prime Sus­pect with Helen Mir­ren.  The Hus­band isn’t really inter­ested in the series and there­fore doesn’t watch it.  [By the way, what’s up with that?  I watch what­ever The Hus­band wants to watch no mat­ter how lit­tle inter­est I have because he won’t watch things alone.  But The Hus­band has no inter­est in most of what inter­ests me and sim­ply won’t watch it.  Is this a guy thing or just my guy?]

I noticed the Sat­ur­day mail­ing thing a week or so ago.  Then today I got a notice of receipt and when I checked my queue sure enough they’d sent out another disc.  I looked at Netflix’s blog but saw no men­tion of expand­ing ser­vice to Sat­ur­day.  So nat­u­rally I Googled it and dis­cov­ered that Net­flix is doing a pilot pro­gram of Sat­ur­day pro­cess­ing at some of its pro­cess­ing cen­ters, but not all, with the pos­si­bil­ity of expand­ing to all of the pro­cess­ing cen­ters at a later date.

Sure makes me won­der at the irony — Net­flix decides to try Sat­ur­day pro­cess­ing just as the United States Postal Ser­vice pon­ders the idea of elim­i­nat­ing Sat­ur­day delivery.

Related posts:

1. $$: Doc­tor & Panda Express (plus unre­ported expenses)
2. Day 140: A Full Day Of Entertainment
3. Day 105: A Busy, Budget-Busting Day in the ‘Burbs