So I was getting frustrated with how long it took for Zip disks to come to me, and I thought maybe it was slower than it was, but I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it.
Fortunately, Zip.ca provides a history of all discs you’ve rented and when you received them. This means I could take that list of dates and put it into R, plotting how much time passed from one disc to the next:
Now, I can’t really isolate the time it takes them to ship a dvd to me out from the time it takes me to watch the disc, but at first glance it seems to have sped up instead of slowed down. Right at the end you can see a little dip where it was shorter than average for a while and then the last two discs were longer than average. That’s probably the source of my frustration right there, that I was lulled into complacency since they were all arriving quickly, and then suddenly slowed.
There are a couple 0s on the list, those are cases where a disc arrived damaged so they sent a replacement immediately. If I remove those as outliers, the mean number of days between discs is 19.5. My account allows for 2 deliveries per month, but only one disc out at a time. Since 19.5 is over half the length of a month, this means I did not always receive both deliveries in a month.
Again, excluding the broken replacements, I received 66 discs since signing up in March 2010. At $7.49 per month, over 43 months, that’s $4.88 per disc. At the local store, Movie Village, I can rent DVDs for $3.50, unless it’s a new release, with some deals on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
I had known going in that it was slightly more expensive per disc but I signed up for access to a wider selection. But I’ve also found it sometimes goes both ways. For example I rented Tank Girl at Movie Village because it was available there but not on Zip.