Ah, Netflix. Killer of brick-and-mortar video stores; red-jacketed savior of people having a crappy day who come home to find that at least there's a decent flick waiting for them. These days, the rent-by-mail company offers around 100,000 tiles, sends out some 1.9 million discs per day (another 10,000 movies are available for instant download) — and passed the billion-discs-shipped mark last February.

And the outfit is quite efficient: According to the company, some 96% of customers clicking around the site receive their movies the next day. This basically means, barring some major mail-ending catastrophe in your ZIP code (in which case, hoarding nonperishable food and bottled water may be a more pressing concern than seeing Will Smith's most recent magnum opus), any disc ordered on a Monday morning will most likely appear in your mailbox by Tuesday — unless all copies are at far-away distribution hubs, which occasionally adds a day or two to the delivery date.