Come and geddit. Our August newsletter is out.

I know our first birthday party was of biblical proportion, but this is ridiculous! I got the story from Eric, one of our members who was pretty blown away with this spontaneously combusting pine tree on Gillies Street. I didn’t realise how impressive it was until our local roving photographer Michael Silver of newNorth printing caught some pics on his swish nokia. Did you see it? Or were you the neighbour caught roasting marshmellows from your balcony?

I just had a dreadful experience at Pulse pharmacy in Northcote Plaza. I was accused of lying, treated with suspicion and contempt.. all as I was trying to return a completely unused pair of sunglasses with tags still on and receipt intact that I bought from them under 30 days ago.

I was dragged into store policy discussions with staff and told they were unable to do anything because it was the law! They confused store policy that obviously allows them no discretion with LAW and had the stupidity to try and throw that at me. They told me the staff member who had told me it would be fine to return them, signed her name on the receipt and instructed me to say Maria said it was OK if there were any problems should not have done so! I explained this is not my problem and the customer should not be involved in their internal miscommunications. There appeared to be no one in the store willing to show any initiative.

I then witnessed a staff member complain loudly about me in front of others. I can not believe the lack of understanding about service and all for a $30 pair of sunglasses! They just lost a heap of business - my business over the next few years, my brothers and my partners and anyone who will listen to me I say to you… do not use Pulse pharmacy at Northcote… I have always found the ones on Station St great anyway

Am I alone in my fight for good customer service?!! Andrew, Mara, Simon and I will never treat you like this in our store…

A few weeks ago we made page 13 of the local Leader here in Northcote. That far in, I was amazed at how many people read it! Goes to show mainstream media still has it’s readership.

What look do you call that Sare?

Ok .. that’s in the States and not here, but wow! That ain’t a vote of confidence for the good ‘ol large store format. The DVD rental industry has evolved into 3 models .. mail-order, local large format and vending machine. Vending machines in the states are going great guns. Redbox has 8000 (and is prepping for an IPO), DVDPlay has 1400 and The New Release has 2000.

Australia is of course a different story. Our in-store rental market is about $500 million/year, whereas the States is about $7.5 billion. That goes someway to explaining why Quickflix and Bigpondmovies are struggling by comparison to Netflix (which has gone gangbusters), and why Blockbuster can even contemplate rolling out 10,000 kiosks while Instant DVD here (and with some great media coverage from Today Tonight) has managed only 23.

But .. the trend is there, and we’re keeping an eye on it!

Everyone’s going online! Sanity has just launched loadit.com.au. This is a purchase and music subscription service. Gizmodo is pretty scathing as the service is chock full of Windows DRM that puts it at odds with recent movement to go DRM free. And they of course don’t support the iPod. Who was the genius behind that strategy? Perhaps Microsoft paid for it all :-).

Launched today, iTunes now sells and rents movies online! Just 2 months ago I bought an ep of Lost on iTunes for the helluv it.

So ‘There Will Be Blood’ for $25. Is a $5 saving worth it over a $30 DVD? No slick, store it on your hard drive, less than DVD quality? The big news is rentals! You can’t rent TWBB but you can rent 27 Dresses for $5.99 for apparently 2 nights. We’re still doing it for $5.50 .. so that’s pretty competitive! Except you need to buy the apple TV for $329 to watch it from your lounge room, and lets not forget we do it for $2 on tuesday or $3.33 if you rent 3 of our latest releases in our 3 for $10 deal :-). But hey - it’s launched and it’s the first online rental service in Australia I’d give a shot. This is really going to test Ezy DVD’s download service, ezydownload.com.au.

As for the offline rental world .. yep it’s clearly another competitor and another downward pressure that all rental stores will feel. Your old school video store is starting to feel a bit creaky me thinks. Barn-like spaces, movies buried somewhere in 50 metres of shelving, no easy search .. there’s gotta be a better way.

Careful what you wish for… Simon and I started throwing some crazy ideas about viral video a few months ago and before you know it we’re out on the street with a film crew! Thanks to Nigel and Olivia from THIRDROW Films we have everything in the can for APPLEBOX’s first short film! What a pool of talent is out there in our community….

Everyone below volunteered their time and resources and Simon and I would like to say a big fat thank you, we are still pinching ourselves that it’s really happening!

The Crew

The Cast

Over the next few weeks I will be writing about the process of putting a film together, it may be a short film but the process is the same so stay tuned to some interesting facts and of course some very amusing photos!!

Google have snapshotted our street .. check it out here and here. We’ve been immortalised with our old signage and on a rather overcast day. I reckon a couple of minutes earlier and they might have got one of us sitting on our chair out the front enjoying a coffee as the sun poked through. Life in a DVD shop ain’t all that bad!