GameFly Filing Complaint Against Postal Service

These days popping down to the local rental store isn’t as popular as it used to be; Netflix’s format has heavily dominated the rental business and after a while someone realized that the same framework could work with video games. Rental service GameFly works in the same manner; pay a subscription depending on how many games you want at once and select your titles. The game discs are mailed to you in small paper envelopes which double as the return envelopes when you’re finished.

GameFly has apparently experienced incredibly high breakage of their discs and has been doing a constant dance of meetings and appeals to the postal service to try and get theses percentages down. As you might imagine with video games costing around $60 while DVDs are often a third or less of that price, GameFly’s profits are cut into quite sharply by high loss rates.

They’re now filing a complaint against the Postal Service, citing that their business is being harmed by preferential treatment that’s being given to other companies. You see, though Netflix and Blockbuster ship their dvds and games the same way around seventy percent of their mail is removed from the piles of letters and other items that get fed through automatic sorting machines. GameFly has requested the same service be granted to them, but apparently this hasn’t happened. In addition to high breakage rates, nineteen USPS employees have been fired for stealing discs from GameFly, which likely means there’s even more of it happening.