Netflix and Walmart Having Hard Time

General News — By Ricky on April 22, 2009 at 7:11 pm

In the hustle and bustle of our society today it is impossible to get away from the continuous skyrocketing prices that almost every product and every service is offered at. The sad part about this is it is something that seems to affect every single area of our lives. This includes the rising prices of the movies that an endless amount of families and individuals watch at home, including myself! The freedom we have of choosing to renting or purchasing movies from such places as Blockbuster, Wal-Mart and Netflix appears to be an offer of convenience from each of these companies. However, the monopolizing factors that lie just below the surface is a problem that could very well end up causing an increase in prices to even more amounts than we already spend on movie rentals and purchases.

We no longer have the ability to rent movies from Wal-Mart because of an agreement made with Netflix who in turn promise to promote them as the number one place buyers should go for purchasing movies. This act has caused a lawsuit filed in California to surface, which states that this monopoly agreement has only caused hurt to consumers. There are numerous customers of the popular Blockbuster Company who have felt the crunch of what this monopolizing agreement has caused because this well known company has been forced to raise the prices that they offer on movie purchases and rentals just so they can stay in the competition.

You would think that this would be an easy problem to solve where all parties could win and prosper in the end. With the tremendous amount of revenue that Wal-Mart and Netflix brings in, they would not feel any pain in lowering some of their subscription rates and prices, and in turn Blockbuster would be able to do the same. Everyone would benefit in this scenario and that would include the thousands of consumers who rely on these companies.