Thursday, July 07, 2005

RedBox DVD Rentals at McDonald's. Verdict: cool.

Last night, Kamila and I were looking to watch a DVD at about 11:30PM. I wasn't in the mood to drive to Blockbuster, but I remembered seeing an ad for DVD rentals at McDonald's and decided to give it a try (there's a McDonald's close to my house in Osseo, Minnesota. The service is in testing now and only available in six U.S. cities).

The service is run by RedBox, and what they have installed in McDonald's are essentially vending machines for DVDs. The rental process couldn't be easier - pick the movie(s) you want from the machine's touchscreen, click on 'checkout', swipe your credit card, and the DVDs pop out of the machine. No membership signup or personal data required (other than your credit card number, of course). They do allow the renter to input an email address to receive an invoice, which I did, and I had the invoice in my Inbox when I got home with the movies (Be Cool and Hitch).

Not only is the RedBox service fast, easy, open late, and close to my house - the rentals only cost $1.00 (due back by 10PM the following day). If you keep the movies longer, they simply charge your card an additional one dollar per day (when you get to $25.00, they stop charging late fees, and you own the movie).

I'd be interested to know what McDonald's gets out of this. Even if they don't get a cut of the rental fees (and I suspect they do), the fact that you have to go to McDonald's to rent movies is a brilliant move by McDonald's to increase traffic to their stores. It worked on me - not only did I rent two movies, I brought home a 10 piece Chicken McNuggets for Kamila, and two Double Cheeseburgers for myself. When I bring the movies back today, it'll be hard to resist the temptation to pick up a little something to eat.

3 Comments:

Blogger Roland Kaehler said...

It's a cool idea. There was a 'movie vending machine' in my neighborhood grocery store in Toronto 10 years ago and I always though it was great. I'm surprised it has taken so long for them to become more common.

Unfortunately, it was not in McDonald's then so I could not pick up a Big Mac when I got my movie.

12:11 AM  
Blogger Jack DeNeut said...

Yeah, I've seen them in various places over the years as well, but never really got in the habit of using them.

I think that Redbox/McDonald's might succeed this time.

Location, location, location - McDonald's has thousands of high traffic stores all over the U.S.
Synergy - the whole "rent movies to people getting food" and "sell food to people renting movies" is a good combination for both Redbox and McDonald's.
Slick interface - some of the other machines I'd used had rather clumsy interfaces for actually renting movies.
Price - you can't really beat a buck a night in the U.S. for new releases.

If this works out for McDonald's, it'll be interesting to see what else they try. Already, there's a McDonald's in Plymouth, MN that has leather couches and flat-screen TVs and is starting to look more and more like a sports bar.

7:44 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting. The US is constantly proving to be the ultimate creative force in the corporate sense. Wish Europe had the same sense of revenue generating ideas.

Arek

1:28 PM  

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