Matt's

I feel sort of bad for Netflix. Although today’s announcement was just a boneheaded move that made no sense (unless they’re planning to sell off their DVD branch), I suspect that the reality of their price hikes is that they’re getting squeezed by movie studios.

Here’s what the studios don’t seem to understand: I use Netflix because it’s easier than The Pirate Bay. When you pull your titles off Netflix, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Sure, I’ll check iTunes and maybe try Amazon’s on-demand service. But if those services don’t have your movie, or are stupidly expensive ($2 per episode on Amazon?!), my next option isn’t to go to Best Buy and try to find your DVD on the rack and then pay $25 for something I’m going to watch once. It’s to just grab it on the The Pirate Bay.

But here’s the ludicrous thing — I’m perfectly willing to pay! I don’t go to The Pirate Bay because I’m a sleazy lowlife who refuses to pay for things. I go there when you won’t sell your product to me in any sensible form. If I’m going to purchase the episodes (as Amazon’s service implies), I want to download them to my computer in a DRM-free format and put them on my NAS, because I paid to purchase them. If I’m only purchasing the right to stream them on demand, $2/episode is outlandish. And any way you spin it, $40 for a set of DVDs of a television show is lunacy.

I just spontaneously remembered a shoe store I went to a few years ago. I’d gone into the city to see a movie with a friend, but I was about an hour early, so I explored the area a little bit. I should explain that “the area” was Park Street by Boston Common.

I went down some sort of alley with some small storefronts. I found a shoe store, and, since I was in the market for new shoes, I stepped in.

First of all, every single person in the store — customer or employee — immediately turned around and stared at me. It wasn’t a quick glance up to see who came in the door, it was every single person turning around and giving me a deer-in-the-headlights look. It was exceptionally unnerving.

I might have thought I was on Candid Camera, except, as I adjusted to my surroundings, things got weirder. No one appeared to be looking at shoes. They were all just sitting around talking. Or, more accurately, looked like they had been, before they had all turned to face the intruder customer in their midst.

Before I turned around to leave, I noticed one last thing. The music. It was outrageously loud, bordering on the threshold of pain. And the music was exceedingly weird for a shoe store. Googling the lyrics, I just found the song I heard: Biggie Smalls’s “Dead Wrong”. I walked in just in time to hear, “I TAKE TOKES OF THE MARIJUANA SMOKE… THROW YOU IN A CHOKE. GUN SMOKE! GUN SMOKE!” (Incidentally, it turns out that this was the least-inappropriate part of the song.)

I left in a hurry and have used Zappos.com ever since.