A former postal service employee recently pleaded guilty to stealing during a one year time frame more than 30,000 DVDs shipped through a western Massachusetts post office.
Federal prosecutors say Netflix alerted local postal officials up to 100 movies routed through that post office mysteriously disappeared each week. Investigators then filmed the mail handler taking DVDs from packages and slipping them into his backpack.
That’s a lot of entertainment.
Netflix only ships dvds in a Netflix-created dvd jacket inside their ubiquitous red envelopes, it would be very difficult to sell stolen dvds in that packaging.
Conservatively assuming each dvd contained 1.5 hours of viewing content, 30,000 * 1.5 = 45,000 hours; while there are only 8, 760 hours in a year (365 days * 24 hours=8,760 hours). Minus the approximately 2,000 hours the mail handler would have been at work, sans dvd player, and deducting another 9 hours a day for sleeping, commuting to work, etc., at best he would have had 3,475 hours to view dvds.
The former mail handler will be sentenced Dec. 23, 2009, and faces 10 months to 16 months in prison and restitution costs of about $38,000. After factoring in former employee’s “lost wages,” of approximately $52,000 (determined using Glass Door‘s estimated annual salary for mail handlers), those 30,000 dvds were valued at under $5 each.
I hope that individual has access to a dvd player while serving his sentence; using the figures above, viewing all 30,000 stolen dvds will take approximately 12 years.
On the other hand – $100,000 in fines and lost wages/$27 per month for Netflix‘ 4 dvds at a time and unlimited instant watch membership = 3703 months, or 308 YEARS of dvd/blu-ray access.
I’m just saying…
“If my film makes one more person miserable, I’ve done my job.”
- Woody Allen (American Actor, Author, Screenwriter and Film Director, b.1935)
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