Vinegar Syndrome and Their Partner Labels

[PfR73]

In case anyone notices that the new Magnolia partner Blu-ray of Redacted runs almost a minute longer than the DVD & is wondering, it turns out it's entirely due to the end credit scroll running about 25% slower (additionally a Deluxe logo has been added to the part of the scroll with various company/union logos). The rest of the film is exactly the same. However, the new transfer is a lot better than the DVD, which turns out to have been zoomed by about 2%; for example, you can now actually read a lot of the text on various computer screens, which is really blurry on the DVD transfer, and now has more visible text with the additional image.

[Peacock]

regardless of whether they say it or not, it's pretty pathetic for the prices they charge. they clearly have the money if they can open all these stores and license all these titles. literally every UK label has this stuff figured out, and even the US labels that I order from. it's not about increasing the kevyip, it's about owning the stuff that I've already paid for. I'm sure they'd be super quick about shipping out the scalper priced stuff they sell from their eBay storefront!

But that’s my point, you can’t compare Radiance or Eureka or SecondRun to VS in terms of sale order numbers. I imagine even Arrow isn’t on the same level.

VS have been very open about trying to keep up with their increasing demand by moving to a larger warehouse and employing more staff etc but (according to them) every sale gets busier and busier for them.

If they say they will have the sale items shipped out 4 weeks after the start of Partner month and you still choose to order from them you can’t roll your eyes at them for shipping out 4 weeks after the start of Partner month. Period. They clearly aren’t sitting on their hands or going on holiday, once those items are sold they are just taking up precious warehouse space and lead to more and more time consuming customer service messages to reply to asking where their order is.

And I’m sorry to hear you don’t order from Mondo Macabro! Knowing your director tastes I think you’d love Jancso’s Private Vices, Public Virtues.

[MichaelB]

…which is apparently their worst-selling title ever.

It’s also the only one to which I contributed, so it’s probably a curse of some kind.

[dwk]

I don't know if copies of Private Vices are still available from MM, but it should be OOP as they lost the rights to it.

[BoltzmannBrain]

I looked over at the Blu-ray forums and there are people who are still waiting on orders they placed last month? Fuck this consortium, how can anyone defend this

Unlike other labels VS ships their stuff in a specific order after their big sales: subscribers first, flash preorder people second and random buyers last. If you want to get your movies as fast as possible, you must become a subscriber.

It's obvious that they receive way too many orders to be able to ship them all out in a week or two. I'm sure Arrow and Kino Lorber get more than a few orders as well, but they have more (and longer) sale periods in a year than VS so I'm thinking that their order volumes are spread more evenly throughout the year which makes shipping easier, whereas VS gets a huge spike of orders during their two major sales in the year, creating a sudden backlog of tens of thousands of orders that takes roughly a month to sort out.

Twice every year people complain about slow shipping though this procedure has been the same for a long time and people should know by now how this thing works. I have always waited four to six weeks for my VS orders and I have never once whined about it. Guess I'm just more patient than most people.

[domino harvey]

These companies are not doing us a favor by selling to us. It’s not “whining” to point out that it shouldn’t take 4-6 weeks to ship out in stock merchandise. At the volume VS is clearly operating at, hiring a couple people to ship things out is not going to eat into releasing more films, it’ll just come out of the profit margin for these companies which is the only reason they aren’t doing it. They got customers street teaming for them for free, acting like this is not only okay but now you’re the one with the problem if you don’t like it. Too slow? You should subscribe instead! No, they should meet the very low bar minimum of shipping things out in a timely fashion. You cannot possibly defend it taking six weeks to ship out in stock items to domestic addresses, where the only obstacle is lack of staff to ship orders and only greed prevents this from being addressed

As for claims that I, the paying customer, should know this: I haven’t ordered direct from them since they released the Resnais film. Why would I expect that it would take a month to ship in stock inventory? Why is the onus on the customer to expect less and, based on comments here, not complain about it either?

[swo17]

It's not lack of staffing that's delaying shipments. It's an intentional policy that, while they're transparent about it, the casual consumer that does not read all the fine print about sale procedures would not anticipate. So customer frustration is understandable, which you presumably want to avoid as much as reasonably possible when running a business. In other words, VS is "protected" in that it can tap the sign to explain why you have to wait, but if they could make it work to change their policy and ship entirely in-stock orders much sooner, it would be in everyone's best interest

[Peacock]

One of their past Instagram videos this year addresses they have found a new warehouse and increased shipment staffing levels precisely to improve this situation. But then their sale figures presumedly keep rising (encouraged by LE FOMO looking at the rate these sell out these days during their sales).

So Domino’s suggestion is that they hire a couple more people. Which is what they did in anticipation. But it still wasn’t enough to shorten delivery times - although it no doubt prevented them from getting even longer.

Even VS doesn’t have an infinite pool of money to spend on something expensive like full time staffing. And as I said before it’s taking from Peter to give to Paul, they have to balance huge warehouse staff costs with the costs of scanning and restoring films, which is ultimately, I’m sure we all agree, more important than getting a dispatch notice in 2 weeks rather than 3.

It’s not street teaming for a greedy conglomerate; it’s just discussing realistic expectations. The bigger the business the higher the turnover obviously but also the higher the staffing costs to keep things moving at the same rate as the smaller companies.

Radiance and Indicator can take weeks post-sale to dispatch in-stock item orders; but I happily accept this is part of the deal for these businesses thriving and/or surviving. As said before, we all have large collections, so I can wait a bit for a delivery, and it’s not like I’m going to use a Vinegar Syndrome HBF or BF sale to order a time sensitive birthday present for my niece.

I always think of Roger Deakins talking about the difference between working on a low budget independent movie vs a big budget studio sci-fi or action film. He said either way you never have enough money to correspond to the increased production scale and have to cut corners and creatively compromise.

VS has grown huge, through savvy business skills or underhand anti-competitive practice or a combination of both. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they have more net profit to put back into more warehouse staff.

[swo17]

I presume the vast majority of orders include titles that won't be out for a month or two. If you order something like that along with something in stock, it's a reasonable guess that the entire order will ship when all titles are available. But if you just order some in-stock items that are on sale, there is no rush of pre-orders overwhelming the staff at that time. (VS didn't ship anything out in May, right? And I assume they aren't spending that time preparing shipments when the May product isn't out yet and the June product hasn't even been announced.) It seems to me that the only thing keeping those orders from shipping early is the subscribers-first policy

[MichaelB]

Radiance and Indicator can take weeks post-sale to dispatch in-stock item orders; but I happily accept this is part of the deal for these businesses thriving and/or surviving.

It's always seemed to me to be a reasonable trade-off; if you want something quickly, pay full price outside the sale period. If you want it cheaper, that's fine, but you might have to wait a bit.

[Peacock]

Michael - Agreed.

Swo - Part of the problem here is due to VS’ policy of allowing you to combine orders for free shipping. So if you order something during the HBF sale you can then add any title you buy before dispatch in June for free to your order (very helpful for us “internationals”!).

So in my case I placed an order on 1st May and 1st June and was able to combine them. You know how this all works as well as anyone but my point is this means VS probably don’t want to half-prep orders in May that may be cancelled/changed/added to in June.

A solution, one would think, would be an option during checkout which reads “I do not want to combine this with a future order, so mark for delivery ASAP”. But perhaps that isn’t very desirable for a business that is hoping you’ll feel compelled to add a couple of full price Partner Month titles onto your sale order due to the savings of not needing to pay for postage for them.

[swo17]

Fair point about combining orders. They could ship stuff that's ready immediately, but that could frustrate customers who were counting on being able to add the next month's titles at no additional shipping cost

[BoltzmannBrain]

These companies are not doing us a favor by selling to us. It’s not “whining” to point out that it shouldn’t take 4-6 weeks to ship out in stock merchandise. At the volume VS is clearly operating at, hiring a couple people to ship things out is not going to eat into releasing more films, it’ll just come out of the profit margin for these companies which is the only reason they aren’t doing it. They got customers street teaming for them for free, acting like this is not only okay but now you’re the one with the problem if you don’t like it. Too slow? You should subscribe instead! No, they should meet the very low bar minimum of shipping things out in a timely fashion. You cannot possibly defend it taking six weeks to ship out in stock items to domestic addresses, where the only obstacle is lack of staff to ship orders and only greed prevents this from being addressed

As for claims that I, the paying customer, should know this: I haven’t ordered direct from them since they released the Resnais film. Why would I expect that it would take a month to ship in stock inventory? Why is the onus on the customer to expect less and, based on comments here, not complain about it either?

Well, I made some calculations based on their amount of subscribers and the time it takes to fulfill subscriber orders, and I came up with quite a low number for their likely count of warehouse employees. So I'm inclined to believe that they could speed up the entire 4-6 week shipping process if they really wanted to. But even then I rather moan about their increasingly poor title choices than their shipping because what they release is more important to me than how fast I get the products. I don't love everything they do, I have my issues with VS too.