Netflix and Fandango

I like movies. Thanks to my son, now exhibiting symptoms of his upcoming terrible two’s, my wife and I don’t get to see them as often. Naturally, we wouldn’t trade parenthood for the world, but we often reminisce about how frequently we used to go to the movies together in college.

The first way we’ve tried to curb our appetite for movies was Netflix. I was dubious at first. After all, mail-order movies take time to arrive, can get lost in transition, and can easily be damaged. Still, it was fairly cheap, and my wife seemed excited, so we gave it a shot.

I must say that it’s been well worth the money. About $10 a month and we get a new DVD every three or four days. When you work out the numbers, that’s a little over $1 per movie, which is dirt cheap compared to the movie store. All we have to do is make sure the movie gets back in the mailbox the next day and we get more than our money’s worth. That’s to say nothing of the selection. Thanks to Netflix, we’ve been watching the entire Fullmetal Alchemist series and loving every minute of it.

On the flip side, however, we still don’t get many opportunities to go see movies in the theater. Given the choice, I’m sure we’d do so more often, but parenthood comes first. Only once in recent memory have we gotten someone to babysit, namely when we went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Given that was in December of last year, we haven’t been back to the theater in about seven months.

It was on that note that my wife and I recently decided a date was in order. We got some family to agree to babysit and planned a brief afternoon lunch and a movie for just the two of us. It didn’t take much looking to decide on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. And, thanks to the magic of the internet, finding a theater and playtimes was a snap.

It was almost too perfect when I happened on Fandango’s listing. “Click on a time in red to buy tickets” sounded nice and convenient. Of course, I’d never used the service before, so I perused their help section to see how things worked. According to the Fandango’s “Using Fandango to get tickets” guide, “All ticket and convenience charges will be displayed in the area that you enter your ticket types and quantities.”

Straightforward enough, right? I went back to the movie listing, clicked on the show time, and selected two tickets at $5.75 each. The total of $11.50 appeared, and I clicked continue as the site instructed.

Well, much to my disappointment, after filling in all of my credit card information, I was presented with a final order screen that displayed my total as $13.50, which included a $2 “convenience fee.” Wasn’t this supposed to be in the “area that you enter your ticket types and quantities”? As you might expect, I felt swindled and closed the screen without completing my order. I’ll just wait in line at the booth, thank you.

I know I’ve said it before, but this sort of thing really irks me. Business practices such as this are designed to do one thing and one thing only: trick unsuspecting and/or inattentive consumers out of a few extra bucks. I would have been much happier, and much more likely to buy, if they had put all of the charges up front like they said they would. By placing it after my credit card information, they’re counting on me either not noticing or deciding, “Well, I went to all the trouble of typing in information, what’s an extra $2?”

Am I cheap? No. I just hate being manipulated into forking over more money than I’m rightfully expecting to pay. It’s fine print thievery and my AT&T prepaid phone card debacle all over again. How this isn’t illegal is beyond me.

At any rate, I’ve had my rant. I highly recommend Netflix for those who are interested in a good movie consumer experience. Don’t bother with Fandango, though, as it’s obvious that they’re more interested in money than integrity.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look back at the Fandango site. Wouldn’t you know it? They changed the wording to, “All ticket fees excluding convenience charges.” Could it be that they actually noticed my complaint, or was it perhaps that other customers complained about the blatant misinformation? Whatever the case, I still wouldn’t regard them as a trustworthy ticket broker. Sorry, Fandango; you should have been honest from the beginning.