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Don’t know how that happened but my bill keeps decreasing and they just gave me an extra 25g of data so I now have 110g for 25$+tx 🤷 I’ve been with the same provider (Koodo in Canada) for years and change plan to get a better one every now and then but it’s usually more data for the same price and I’ve got a 20$ rebate on every bill…
Hello, I would like 25 grams of data please!
As a programmer with more than a decade of experience, I got a variant of this principal watching newly-minted and utterly useless CS graduates get hired with a salary higher than mine. Only remedy was to quit and go work somewhere else.
In the software industry you’re supposed to go get a new job every year or two until you’re making what you want. That’s how you get raises. It’s dumb.
This also works for. Employees.
"I’ve been here 15 years. Can I get paid what the new hires get?
“Oglh fuck no. No no no. Can’t believe you would ever suggest that.”
Change job all few years.
We made a spreadsheet at my job, and found an occurance of this. Brought it up to my manager. He seemed to agree, generally he’s a cool guy imo, but I have yet to see a change in my compensation.
It’s unlikely that your manager determines your pay rate and raises. That’s usually decided well up the chain.
Yeah, for sure. I’m not blaming him, to be clear.
Having to swotch services every year seems to be the way these days.
I think it’s designed that way because Sales VP’s get bonuses based on new sales, not retention.
So there is an unspoken market force that causes service companies to churn customers. Senior executives want you to leave because the competition is doing the same thing.
All competing companies sales teams benefit from churn as long as all companies work to alienate their customers and make them switch services.
When I ran an isp I had a customer complaint about new sales being cheaper than loyal customers get forwarded to me. I realized my mistake and cut prices across the board so loyal customers paid the same as new promotions. But very large companies are an old boys club. The CEO isn’t going to piss off his VP of sales so the game goes on.
That makes way too much sense.
The infinite growth mindset is the root of all evil
At least with telecoms speeds are fast enough now (in my area)that it just doesn’t matter which provider I use so I always go with the discount guys now and its great.
Nowadays reliability and coverage is actually the selling point.
They may all have enough speed, but usually the expensive ISPs are more reliable. Mostly because the "cheap ISP"s are just the expensive ones in a trenchcoat selling excess bandwidth. But when the excess bandwidth is no longer excess, the cheap ones are the first to be cut off.
So if you don’t need 99.99…% uptime, the cheap ones are much better.
Same with phone plans. You either get 50Mb/s for cheap or a fancy “5G 400Mb/s!!!” for three to five times the price that ends up being 100Mb/s in reality anyways
I can’t stand telecom companies, I bounce around all the time. They ALWAYS have terrible customer service too.
You really just have to threaten them with switching in my experience. Then you can often get the same discounts.
Congratulations, you’ve discovered the only negotiating power consumers have ever and will ever have: voting with your wallet.
Let’s normalize real customer loyalty again by sending a strong message that continued business is not to be taken for granted.
Some have figured out that you can threaten but they still won’t budge banking on the status quo bias to keep you with them. Even when faced with competitor pricing they won’t give a discount. Don’t even give them the warning, just leave. Be a well informed consumer.
Spectrum capped my threats at 4 years. They refused to negotiate so I cancelled. And committed to that decision.
Been 8+ year at the dame ISP. Last year they raised the prices by 11%. Changed providers and pay less for the first year with 4x the download speed. Shortly after I terminated the contract they called me to give me a special offer of 6 months free… I told them I already have a new ISP.
Aboit ten years ago I had XM Radio in my car. Came for free for the first year, then renewed me for $30 for the following year as part of the promo of getting the car. I occasionally used the service for Comedy Central radio and a couple other things, but was largely playing audio off my phone from Spotify/MP3s.
After those two years an XM rep called me since my subscription was about to expire. They wanted $15/mo or $150 for the year. I laughed and said the most I’d pay would be $50 for a year. They tried to argue with me before I cut them off and told them “Look, here’s the deal. Either you find me some special that brings the price down to that rate and get some money from me or you get no money from me since I’ll be canceling my service. You’re selling a service that I don’t need and has limited benefit to me that my phone hooked up to my car can’t do.”. After a few minutes they found me a special and got approval from their manager. That wound up being my last year of using the service.
It’s dumb how much publically traded companies try to squeeze their" customers" and staff to drive up value for their true customers, the share holders. It’s such a short term view on life and value.
This reminds me of the people you see in stores who are trying to sell you on a phone plan. I have mint mobile and pay like $15 a month for my plan which has more than enough data. They asked how much I currently pay and I told them it and they just immediately gave up and were like yeah we can’t match that.
Cox did this with my dad, fucked around and found out. To this day, if you bring up Cox Cable, my dad goes, “OH, you mean the company I was a loyal customer to for 32 years, 10 months, and 17 days?!”
He had one of those cable-internet-landline bundles and was paying something like $150/month for it, something about he just had to call every renewal or something like that. Well, him and my mom fell on some hard times and forgot/missed a payment/something happened with Cox.
My dad gets the bill the next month, and it says his package is now $300/month (or something ridiculous like that). He calls Cox and wants to know what’s up, why his bill doubled in a month, etc They told him he missed his renewal and thus his promotional price was lost, and now he’s got to do the regular price. He explains what’s been going on and how they’re doing their best, they want to remain a customer, but they’re not paying $300/month for something they were paying $150/month for.
Cox refused to budge, offering a like $25/month discount at best. So my dad goes, “So, I just want to understand… If I was a new customer creating a new account, you’d give me my old rate? And if I hadn’t missed the thing last month, you’d give me my old rate?” Correct. “So my being a customer of yours for over 32 years… That gets me nothing?!” That’s correct, Sir, so would you like to renew, make any changes, or make a payment?
“Oh, you can close the account, I’ll be dropping off your equipment in about 3 hours, thank you.” And they still argued with my dad, I think they moved up to $50/month discount, and he just told them to kick rocks, he would rather have no internet, cable, or telephone, than give Cox his money ever again. And to this day, he refuses to recommend Cox to anyone, and tells them to check his file whenever they call or come to the door trying to get him to come back.
It’s because the people who will actually cancel are the minority. The companies wouldn’t do this if it resulted in a net loss for them. They make more money being assholes, so they’ll always be assholes.
They’ve got a deal that’s three years for $99 but you have to really push them to offer it to you. They say it’s for new customers only but it really isn’t.
What’s dumb is that Sirius will continue doing that indefinitely, but you have to play the game and call to cancel, then go do the whole song and dance. So I didn’t even activate the free shit that came with the car. I don’t want to play that game. I would pay the lower rate indefinitely if they just charged that, but I’m not going to play games.
I would pay the lower rate indefinitely if they just charged that, but I’m not going to play games.
Yeah. A/B tests have no way to prove the value of customer loyalty to a fair deal, so nobody knows how to implement it anymore.
There’s historic evidence - Coca Cola was infamously still 5¢ long after everything else went up in price, and it worked out.
But everyone is obsessed with “engagement” right now.
The value proposition of satellite radio is so incredibly bad for the overwhelming majority of people I don’t understand how they’re still in business.
Also the quality is awful. If I wanted audible compression artifacts I could dust off my late 90s mp3 collection.
Never understood this. Study after study tells us how much more it costs to find a new customer, instead of retaining an existing one.
Profit graph needs to go up or stakeholders get mad.
same with employees
It costs more, but those are indirect costs associated with marketing. Most executives only look at sales and expenses and don’t think in indirect costs, regardless of how many business people try to explain. So the costs are marketing, we either cut the costs or we cut the budget, but not change what we are doing. Or they don’t care, because of the above collusion mentioned in another comment, or because they want to spend on marketing for their golf buddy, the marketing CEO.
Does it drive me insane, as someone who has a marketing and accounting degree, and had to explain it a bunch of times? Yes. Also most high level executives make up a fantasy version of how the business is being run and feel anyone who doesn’t agree is inherently wrong.
Also most high level executives make up a fantasy version of how the business is being run and feel anyone who doesn’t agree is inherently wrong.
This was quite eye-opening for me, when I discovered it.
I’ve met Chief Information Security Officers who I wouldn’t trust to pick my antivirus product.
The reason some companies do this is because they make a loss on every new customer offer they give out, but it’s designed to just get their custom in the first place. If they offered the same discounts for existing customers, they would go out of business.
Though if you hassle them enough, you can get something close to a new customer offer.
Every 6 months without fail whichever car insurance company I am with raises my rates. My car depreciates in value the whole 6 months and is now less valuable and therefore less costly to replace and yet they raise my premiums. So, every 6 months I have to play this game and switch to another company. Then when you call them to cancel they act disappointed and ask why you want to cancel. Duh!!!
If they use the phrasing “new or returning customers” you can just cancel your service then sign up again.
And then you lose any loyalty or banked credits because it’s technically a “New contract”
I had 100GB of data credit in my pre paid phone plan. I got 2GB a month for $5 unlimited talk and text starting in 2014, it’s a good deal for me. And you can imagine how long it took to bank 100GB even with the occasional free bonus data promo… That plan was replaced with a more expensive one but somehow I got grandfathered in to the cheap plan.
So naturally I didn’t want to rock the boat when I was getting my phone for $5 a month (their cheapest plan now is $20)
But they finally caught on and moved me to the $20 this year, they automatically transferred my data bank and sent me the new terms.
I double checked and while this was their cheapest monthly plan the 6 month plan would save me $80 in the long term so I called to get swapped and they said that I’d lose my data bank because it was a new contract. I argued that they changed my contract and I should have had an opportunity to choose which new contract my data gets transferred to.
I spent ages debating it, but there was nothing the rep or their supervisor could do to reward my 10 years with their company or compensate me for the service I had pre paid for (data) that they now expected me to subscribe to on their new terms to be able to access despite the contract I signed saying something totally different.
Their leading budget competitor had the exact same overall rate but for a yearly pre paid plan, and new customers got a 150GB data bank start up bonus. So my phone bill is paid up for the year now and I’ve still got a decent chunk of data and it didn’t cost more than I was prepared to pay the old company.
(and yes I do use it, I’m a substitute teacher so I’m always using my phone as a hot spot when I’m at a different school)
