So tonight Kim and I did our grocery shopping and I noticed that Cub Foods has swapped out my favorite method of DVD rentals (Hollywood Video branded kiosk) for a Redbox DVD rental kiosk like they have in McDonald’s.

In the past, I would walk up to the machine and browse through the available videos and pick what I wanted, swipe the good ‘ol debit card and next thing you know I’m watching an over-budget and under-acted poorly done movie on my TV at home. Unfortunately, now that Cub has switched vendors, I am sitting at home watching Simpsons reruns (Bart’s Girlfriend) on TiVO.

I walked up to the smallish red kiosk and started going through the menu options. The only movie that caught my eye was American Gangster and I only knew about it from a few previews I had seen so I wasn’t even 100% sure I wanted to watch that. In the meantime, Kim came to my side and started poking through the list herself and came across Michael Clayton which was a movie neither of us knew anything about.

So I clicked on Michael Clayton and attempted to add it to our queue unsuccessfully. After much hunting around on the screen we found out why… The movie would be available in the box on 2/19/08. Ok, weird, let’s try American Gangster! Same thing, available 2/19/08!

Now I’m a little pissed off. The only two movies in this god awful machine that rents by the day that we are interested in seeing aren’t available until next week? I’m confused until I get home and look them up and find out that they aren’t even out on DVD yet! Why the fuck are they listed the titles available when they aren’t out yet? Fuck, why are you listing anything that’s not in the box yet? Hell, that entire list, for all I know, might not even be out yet or might be in someone else’s hand for the evening.

Redbox fucking blows — hard and I’m disappointed that we won’t be renting movies from there again. I certainly won’t return to Blockbuster ($4 for DVD rentals is bullshit) and I’m not going to go to Hollywood’s brick and mortar store either. Unfortunately we don’t rent enough DVDs for Netflix to be at all worth it and I’m not into downloading what’s available from TPB anymore.

I wonder how Hollywood Video decided it wasn’t worth their time to be in Cub or how much Redbox offered to be the sole DVD provider in their store.

Bah to Cub and Redbox!

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