Family Finance Blog

Netflix is a great invention for people who watch a ton of movies. You pay your monthly fee and you get movie after movie after movie, and you don’t have to pay for each one of them. If you’re good, you’ll get your cost per DVD down to about a buck. This is great when compared to Blockbuster stores where, with tax, rentals are almost $5.

For my wife and I who might watch a couple movies a month, Netflix just isn’t worth the cost and $5 at Blockbuster even seems like too much to us. So we look to other places for our movie rentals.

Local library

This is by far our favorite movie rental place due to cost and location. The cost is $0 per DVD and the location is a very short walk from our house. There are no other places to rent DVDs that we can walk to, so we like this one. The down side of our local library is that the selection is very limited. This isn’t as much of a problem as it seems since we only watch a couple movies a month, so most movies we still haven’t seen!

Grocery store

In our area, Albertson’s stores and Von’s stores have started installing DVD rental machines (by a company called Redbox, find a location near you that has one of these boxes). These machines have about 30 of the most popular movies at the time available, and generally keep up to date with the latest releases. The cost is $1 / 24 hours. So if you rent the movie at 6 pm on Friday and return it Saturday morning, it’s $1. If you hold on to it until Sunday at 8 pm, it’s $3. So you should be vigilant in returning the movies, but it’s hard to beat the price.

Laundry room

It may sound like an odd place to look for DVDs, but similar to the grocery store, the laundry rooms of many apartment complexes also have these DVD rental machines. It may take some work to find out which apartments near you might have them, but it could be worth it. The price is generally around $2 / 2 days and laundry rooms at apartment complexes are generally open until at least 10 at night.

Corner liquor store

Near where I used to live the corner liquor store had a decent DVD rental area in the corner. Rentals were $2, and the selection was good enough. The main problem with this venue is that some corner liquor stores make you feel dirty just walking into them. But if you’re out to save a buck, it might be worth it.

So that’s where we get our movies. If anyone else has great ideas, let me know.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 8:33 am and is filed under Frugal living, Free. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.