I’ve been using Netflix off and on for the past five years, and I’ve generally been really happy with the whole deal. I’ve recommended the service to friends, I’ve given it as a gift, and I’ve done my darndest to exploit my membership by seeing just how many dvds I can watch in a month. It is with some dismay, now, that I’ve recently had more and more problems with the service; I guess once again bigger is not necessarily better. First, there’s the issue of “throttling,” the term Netflix aficionados use for the unpleasant sensation we have when we feel like we’re being punished for watching too many dvds.

Ever since they opened up a Worcester distribution center, Netflix has shortened the turnaround time to a whopping one day. Mail it out on Monday, it’s received by Netflix on Tuesday, and you get the next dvd on Wednesday. Wow. When I decided to use one of the company’s new features and give Aimee her own queue within my queue, though, funny things started happening. Netflix would email me Tuesday morning informing me that my dvd had been received, and then all day Tuesday, my queue would report that my next dvd was “awaiting shipment,” but wouldn’t ship out until the next day. I wrote Netflix about this, and their customer service was totally unimpressive. It took four to six days to hear back, and when I did receive a reply, it was always of the canned variety: “We try to ship dvds to you as soon as they are returned. However, sometime it takes a day or two.” Apparently, according to a customer service email that was more informative than the one I received, Netflix gives “priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service. ?As a result, those members who receive the most movies may experience next-day shipping and receive movies lower in their Queue more often than our other members.” Maybe they should just make that clear from the beginning, so we’re not left wondering what we did wrong.

Last week, I rented Truffaut’s Bed and Board, part of the Antoine Doniel series recently released in a terrific box set from the Criterion Collection. While the page for the movie shows the Criterion cover, the dvd I received was the bare-bones Wellspring release from a few years ago. It seems they should either stock the Criterion release or change the advertised cover. Anyway, I wrote to complain and received an email apologizing and advising me to use the “more info” section of the movie page to make sure it’s the film I want. Too bad that wouldn’t have helped in this case. The customer service did improve this time around in one respect: I was given a free “bonus rental” to use any time, which I think I’ll use now as I accidentally placed the wrong part of Ray’s Apu Trilogy in the queue first.

I’m not about to switch to Blockbuster or Walmart (could you two more heinous alternatives? How about Starbucks getting in the act, too?), but I’m a little underwhelmed by Netflix’s customer service.