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GameFly Files USPS Complaint over Broken Discs, Claims Preferential Treatment for Competitor
by Chris Faylor, Apr 24, 2009 9:59am PDTOnline game rental service and Shacknews parent company GameFly today filed a formal complaint against the United States Postal Service, alleging that the USPS provides competitor Blockbuster with preferential treatment to cut down on broken discs.
"GameFly is not the only mailer to experience significant DVD breakage
rates on automated mail processing equipment," reads the filing. "In response...the
Postal Service has adopted a practice of manually culling out the DVD mailers of two
high-volume shippers of DVDs, Netflix and Blockbuster, for special processing."
The company said its request for manual processing "comparable" to that of the movie rental services was denied, which puts GameFly at a disadvantage as its "larger and longer established" rival Blockbuster plans to rent games by mail.
"Because of the preferential treatment given
by the Postal Service, [Blockbuster] enjoys a substantial cost advantage in the distribution of its DVDs," added GameFly.
The company noted its numerous efforts to reduce in-transit disc breakage, including standard protectors and tests with larger mailers, but said that breakage still occurred, even though the Postal Service charged higher rates for First-Class Mail.
GameFly claims it currently experiences a "breakage rate" of approximately 1%.
Another issue, GameFly explained, are the "substantial rates" of discs lost in transit. However, the company added that the USPS has "made vigorous efforts to control the problem," including the arrests of 19 USPS employees alleged of theft.
GameFly had no comment about the complaint when contacted by Shacknews, with the United States Postal Service yet to respond to our inquiry.
Comments
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 8 replies.
Then after separating these mailings they were then processed, or canceled if you will, on a much older, slower canceling machine (called a half-mark or full-mark, depending on what a particular plant had) which is in most cases was fed manually by an employee. Then these separated mailings were place in trays and sent to the flat-sorting machines (because these mailings are actually considered "flats" or magazine sized instead of letter sized, hence part of the problem) to be sorted for delivery.
As for Gamfly, we didn't get anywhere near the volume compared to the others of this sort. In fact, out of a full hamper of around 6-8k pieces of mail you "might" see 1-3 Gamfly mailings. Compare that to several hundred Netflix/BB mailings. Hell, even when Wal-Mart was doing the DvD-by-mail for that short time we saw far more of them compared to GF. In the end I can sympathize with Gamefly but I'm not sure they fully understand the comparisons they are trying to make. Hopefully the USPS will work with them to figure this out.
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