Busting Blockbuster

You knew it was going to happen.
A lawsuit has been launched against Blockbuster. Seems some smartass in New Jersey decided to take our favourite neighbourhood video store to task on their "No More Late Fees" promise. If you haven't heard about it, Blockbuster aired ads during the Oscars claiming they were doing away with late fees. As my friends and I watched slack-jawed, I spotted the fine print at the end of the commercial:

ADDITIONAL CHARGES MAY APPLY

What? Let me get this straight: you're telling me that there are no more late fees, but that "additional charges may apply"? I gleefully pointed out this fallacy to my friends, and we immediately started placing bets on how long the campaign would last.
Stuart McLean spoke about it on the Vinyl Cafe Saturday morning, and shed a little light on what exactly these addional charges entailed. A customer returning a video past the due date would not only be charged a 'replacement fee' for the video, but would also be required to pay a 'restocking charge'. Which, as far as I understand it, is pretty much a very expensive late fee. Which in turn suggests that this ad campaign is pretty much one big lie - i.e.: false advertising.

I cannot believe such a monumentally moronic idea even made it past the brainstorming stage - all misrepresentation issues aside. Doing away with late fees is pretty much the same as telling people to just keep the video for as long as they like, which sounds like bad policy for a rental business if you ask me. Now, folks that dream up campaigns for big companies (and I'm going to generalize here) tend to be rather focused on the whole dollars and cents side of the equation, so I'm pretty sure the whole "bad for business" thing was brought up fairly early on. What I find truly stupefying is their 'eloquent' solution to the problem: "We'll just slap them with a couple of fees and call them something else."
Huh? Who gives jobs to maroons like these? Did they honestly not think that the first person to get hit with this would not raise a stink? Personally, I'd be livid if this were to happen to me (it wouldn't, as you couldn't pay me to go to Blockbuster), and you can bet I'd be writing letters about it.

Let's break this off before I switch over to Rant Mode. I've got some other things to do this evening.