I knew there was a reason we used Netflix. (OK, so there are multiple reasons — my favorite being that movies just appear in your mailbox as if by magic.)

But, due to an issue with our mail, we didn’t get the DVD we were expecting to watch this weekend. Now this almost never happens — movies usually arrive like clockwork on exactly the day they’re expected — but this time it did.

Since we still wanted to watch the DVD, we decided to stop by Blockbuster and get it. We found the DVD, took the case to the cash register, and they rang us up after looking up our long-dormant membership.

I about fell over when they said, “OK, that’ll be $5.46”.

When we exclaimed over the price, they said that it had been that way for a long time. Apparently the last time we rented a movie was in 2008, back when it cost us $4.64.

Now I know an 82 cent increase after 2 years isn’t really a ton, but we usually watch 1 or 2 movies every week. So at $5.46 we’d be spending a lot on DVDs if we’d continued to get them from Blockbuster.

Instead, we pay $15.12 per month in order to have 2 DVDs out at a time. So it’s a huge savings for us on something we would get anyway. And no sticker shock.