I’ve blogged about this before, but for the three-at-a-time plan with Blockbuster ($17.99) they would give me four in-store rentals a month, plus four more if I had rewards. Combine that with the fact that they weren’t throttling bastards like Netflix and you’ve got a recipe for success.

Enter Total Access, a new plan where you can return your movies to the store rather than in the mail and essentially get a free in-store rental for every movie you return that way. This means that with Rewards, I can go in on a Tuesday with my free rental coupon and three online movies in hand, walk out of there with five movies (three for the online returns, one with the coupon, and one from Rewards). Then if I happen to be using my one “Blockbuster Favorites” rental per month with rewards I could get one more, bringing the total to six movies on one trip. To boot, they’ll ship my three online rentals the NEXT DAY.

It used to be that the Blockbuster online system couldn’t hold a candle to the power and ease-of-use that the Netflix interface had. After a recent update to the page I’d say that Blockbuster is at least on par with Netflix if not better.

The bottom line is that they really are this generous. I talked to a manager at Blockbuster last night and he just said that the plan relies on people not thinking like I do in order for it to succeed. Remember the motto of my college econ prof Tom Rusticci as you take advantage of this program, “Gifts are good”.

…to be true, they say it probably is. Sometimes though, it actually is that good.

So I recently signed up with Blockbuster online as an alternative to Netflix because I had been throttled. I normally get my movies back in the mail the next day, and while I had pulled in around 16 movies a month from Netflix for a long time, they changed their practices around the beginning of the year and that number dramatically dropped.

Ok, pay attention. I found a bit of a loophole that’ll get me some serious bang for my buck from our friends at Blockbuster. How many movies can I get from Blockbuster for the same $$$? Well, this is the fun part. I started my one-month trial on January 26th. As of today I have received 15 movies, two are on their way, plus my two in-store rentals for this month. Blockbuster recently gave users the option to convert their two-per-month in-store rentals to a one-per-week in-store plan. Since they got the timing off a bit, that allowed me to get two more weekly coupons for in-store rentals. For those keeping score, that brings me to 21.

But wait, I’m getting to the good part. When I went to the store tonight I saw some big banner they had in the window about joining Blockbuster Rewards and getting free movies for a year. I picked up a flyer and asked the clerk about the plan. To boil it down, you give Blockbuster $10 for a 1-year membership to Rewards. For your Alexander Hamilton you get a free movie (movie must be over one-year old) for every in-store rental you buy. Buy however is a very loose term, and the movies I pick up with my online coupons will count for Blockbuster Rewards. The catch is that you can only do this on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

So here’s what I do. Each week I print out my coupon on Monday, go into the store and grab two movies – one of which is more than a year old. I take it up to the clerk and hand him my coupon and walk out. This brings me up to 8 in-store rentals each month for a year. Throw that onto the 15 movies I hope to get during a normal month and that puts me at 23. That would be 276 movies in one year, or around 82 cents per movie. Compare that to Netflix at about $1.50/movie based on $17.95 3-plan and 12 movies per month. If you’re buffering the movies like me, that starts to look like a pretty attractive alternative to cable.