Hello all, I am back to share another "Tales from the Video Store" installment. This series is going to cover many different facets of my time working at the Video Store and I promise it won't always be complaining! This blog post is going to cover on of my biggest pet peeves from working at the Video Store and that is...late fees.
For those that didn't experience the Video Store, let me explain how the rentals worked in the store I worked in. For very new movies, you could only rent those movies for one night. Somewhat new movies were able to be rented for up to 2 nights and older movies could be rented for 3 to 5 days. If you didn't return the movie by the end of the day it was due, a late fee would be charged per day by the system.
This is where the nightmare starts. The next time the customer comes in to rent, when their account is brought up, a flashing indicator would say how much they owed. The amount charged was based on the movie and how many days it was overdue. The least amount it could be was 1 dollar and the highest it could be is...well A LOT! As soon as the indication comes up, we had to inform the customer of the amount, what movies were late and then they had to pay before they could rent more videos.
Some people were cool about it. They would just admit it and pay the fee. It was the other group that would create fireworks. Sometimes we would have lines of people waiting to check out with their movies and a customer would want to have a 15 minute angry rant over 2 dollars. Even though I was making barely over minimum wage, there were times when I wanted to just pay it for them because it wasn't worth the time. But I never did. :)
Source
Kudos if you know what movie this clip is from without looking it up. Pizza tip from me for the first person to comment the movie title. No cheating. ;)
So late fees caused the Video Store worker a lot of stress. I know it was annoying for the customer too. There were heated conversations between spouses at the counter, "you told me you returned those!" I did my best to stay calm no matter what but being screamed at is a difficult task.
Did you have any experiences with late fees at the Video Store? No one likes paying extra money. I totally get it, I don't either. But remember to try not to take it out on the person behind the counter (This advice is to me too!).
Thanks for reading and have an awesome rest of your day!
