Redbox-ed

Where have I been? Walking out of Wal-Mart this week, I finally took notice of a big red box sandwiched between the buggies and the lose-your-coins-in-the-toy-machine game. It was a DVD rental box, dispensing your choices for $1 a night!

Wow! I can't even rent new DVDs at the local low-budget rental place for that. (It's $1.49.) Not that the choices listed on the front of the box were enticing me to stick my credit card in the slot, but the concept sufficiently intrigued me that I scurried home (had to, had frozen items) and looked it up.

Redbox is a joint venture of Coinstar (change your change into cash) and McDonald's, of all entities. Generally, they're to be found at McDonald's, but as I don't frequent our local McD's (no young kids, don't have to), I have to rely on the website's find-location feature to tell me that in my community it's at Wal-mart, not McD's. You make an online account, see what the choices are where you're going to be, go get it. If you don't return it after a month, it's considered yours, the charges having mounted up sufficiently on your credit card.

Interestingly you can return it to any redbox. That reminded of a system I saw at Cracker Barrel several years ago where you could rent an audio book at one Cracker Barrel and return it to any other place with the same system, CBarrel or not. I don't know if they still have that service and their website didn't mention it.

This would appear to be just another answer to the Netflix explosion. Competition being a good thing, I'll keep an eye on our redbox (now that I know it's there) and see what happens with content and staying ability.