Posted by Derek Janssen on 06/11/07 19:37

Bill's News wrote
>
>>I do what they recommend (I think?), and put all my Very Long
>>Waits at the top of the list--
>>It'll take bit of slight delay to get your next Now movie
>>shipped, but I've also ended up with a few surprises that
>>helped clean some of the non-Now chaff off the queue. :)
>
> I've no idea what NF recommends. Like you, however, I too move
> any waited item to the top of the "Now"s in the queue.
> Recently, I rented "Taken." It had been lower in my queue for
> weeks or months. Listed as a 6 disc series, I noticed that disc
> 6, which only contained "bonus" materials, one day became VLW.
> After a week of that not changing, I moved the "Now" discs, one
> at a time, to the top of the queue and received each the day
> after doing so. After I returned the 5th disc, the title was
> removed. I'm guessing that the 6th disc had been destroyed (or
> the renter had died) and that I had rented the last available
> set. This somewhat confirmed my concern that, when an older
> video shows a wait of any length, it may be their last copy and
> they may find replacement unwarranted.

Sometimes VLW means "No copies, and one step away from being permanently
retired to 'Unreleased'"--
So it's a good idea to give them "Last chance to rent" top-priority spot
on your list, if there's nothing else that week you immediately want to
rent...Better to plan ahead.

Sometimes, though, VLW just means the copies are so rare, they've
haven't bothered to check lately whether any of the centers currently
have a copy, and a customer putting it to the top of a queue may be the
kick in the pants for them to look it up.
If you put a VLW up to top spot, you MIGHT see it fluctuate in and out
between Long and Short Wait, or even Now over the weekends, and then
still end up skipped over for readier disks on the Monday ship-out--Take
this as a good sign, which means they *are* looking for copies, it'll
just take a while to approve you for them. (Just had two of these in the
last two weeks, one of them just this morning.)
If you don't see its status changing in and out...prepare to abandon all
hope. -_-

Derek Janssen
ejanss@comcast.net

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