Earlier this summer we dropped our Netflix membership. Don’t get me wrong, we love Netflix — it’s one of those rare companies that just seems to get it comes to providing a valuable service at a competitive price. But we were just about to move, and we also knew that we’d be travelling quite a bit over the summer, so why pay for movies that we wouldn’t be watching?

Later on this summer I was reminded of what a great deal Netflix really is… We were looking for something to do on an unbearably hot Saturday afternoon, and we ended up deciding to take our three oldest boys to see “Cars” in our local theater. Guess what?

We dropped enough on the tickets alone (at matinee pricing, no less) to pay for six weeks of Netflix. Six weeks. All for the price of one trip to the movie theater.

That’s a month and a half of basically unlimited movie watching. No need to burn gas (or time) on a trip to the video store only to find that all of the good movies are checked out. No need to pay late fees if we don’t get the movie back in time. And no need to drop a wad of cash on a sticky-floored movie theater.

That evening, I sat down and re-activated our Netflix account, and we haven’t looked back since.