A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: All-encompassing sign | Main | Next: Copenhagen metro railings
March 18, 2004 12:12 AM
Broken: Rewind DVD sticker
This sticker was on the inside of a DVD I rented. This was taken about 3.5 years ago, late in 1999/early 2000. A little bit before DVDs were truly mainstream.
See, for example, http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/18028 and http://www.raptorial.com/Zine/b-buster.htm discussions.
I have a load of DVD's with that on. I buy a lot of used DVD's and all of them have had stuff like "Please be kind, rewind". I've even had some warning me there'd be a charge if my DVD wasn't rewound:)
When Albertsons (the grocery store chain) began offering DVD rentals about 3 years, they put the same Please Rewind sticker on all their DVDs. Indeed, it ended up being what Heng-Cheong suggested: The store was recycling stickers for VHS that had a magnetic security strip. It still looked ridiculous.
Andrea Seigal has a very funny rant about this topic here:
http://andreaseigel.typepad.com/afternoon/2004/03/love_you_mom.html
The King Soopers (Kroger) near me still uses these stickers, when I asked, they said that they contained the security device so that you couldn't take it out the door. They have no plans of changing this practice.
The bit that bugs me about this picture is the sticker on the DVD. This sticker runs the risk of unbablancing the DVD and causing damage to the DVD or your player.
The funny thing is picturing the technologically inept hitting the back button on the DVD player and running the entire movie in reverse before returning it....
Easy solution (and a nice moneymaker).
Take a CD player that doesn't work, but the motor still spins. Gut it and make your own little case for it. Wire it so that it spins up for a bit, then spins down. Call it a DVD rewinder and make money off stupid people.
My friend and I thought of this (we work at Blockbuster), and we were laughing our asses off cause we KNOW people at our store (Northern VA) would buy something like that.
-Syn
the most hillarios thing about this is there actually is a dvd rewinder thing i have a pic i keep on my deskto so i laugh every time i turn n my computer i put up a url, let me know if anyone reads this... http://www.joe-ks.com/archives_nov2004/DVDRewind.jpg
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: All-encompassing sign | Main | Next: Copenhagen metro railings
The sticker might also contain a magnetic security strip. The store might be recycling stickers for VHS.
See, for example: and .
Posted by: Heng-Cheong at March 18, 2004 01:29 AM