Posted by Jim on 02/17/06 04:02

We have been Netflix customers from about two months now. and we have
noticed something curious about the service. We live in Hawaii, and at
first the Netflix DVDs would arrive in a return envelope that said it
was from "Nearest Netflix center" with a Honolulu address. Very nice.
And yes, the service was fast.

And then today we returned the latest DVD that we watched last night,
and guess what????? Surprise!!! The return address for the DVD was
"Nearest Netflix center" in COLORADO. Not the nearest, seems to me.

There are a number of possibilities here:

1. The DVD had to come from (and be returned to) the Colorado center
because it was the only place it was available. Possibly, it might not
have been a very popular selection.

2. Netflix is now letting the USPS throttle things down by deliberately
routing the requests to Netflix processing centers that are far enough
away so that it is guaranteed to take an extra day or two. If we see a
lot more of our Netflix DVDs from faraway places, then that is probably
the case.

3. Even Machaivelli says not to suspect a conspiracy when incompetence
is obvious, but I think that this is not one of those cases. Netflix
seems to be pretty well organized so that if they are using a routing
algorithm that automatically delays things this way, it is probably on
purpose.

JR

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