(please forgive the long reply. I just got off the phone with "tech-support")
When I first got my own place, I signed up for a telephone service. Long distance service was included in the bill. As this was working too well, the phone company had no choice but to change it. One round of mega-corporation shuffling later, and my telephone service was SWB and my long distance was Sprint.
This was still OK, as I didn’t use long distance much, and thus didn’t get a bill too often. Once again, that was a situation the service providers could not tolerate. I think it was about two years ago, when Sprint changed their policy. Now they’d be charging me on the order of $5 per month whether I made any long-distance calls or not. It goes without saying that they could not combine my long distance bill with my cellular bill, despite the presence of the word “Sprint” on both of them.
Don’t get me started on my old ISP. Apparently I’m the only person in the USA who insists on paying as I go via monthly billing, as opposed to just giving them my credit card number.
I see questionable business tactics like this becoming more and more frequent. If this trend continues, eventually mega-corps will just send large men with crowbars to our homes to extract money for potential future services. As near as I can figure it’s some weird backlash to being unable to offer a product or service anyone would actually consider paying for.
Congrats on sticking to the mega-corp. If enough consumers do this, maybe we can turn this tide.
no subject
When I first got my own place, I signed up for a telephone service. Long distance service was included in the bill. As this was working too well, the phone company had no choice but to change it. One round of mega-corporation shuffling later, and my telephone service was SWB and my long distance was Sprint.
This was still OK, as I didn’t use long distance much, and thus didn’t get a bill too often. Once again, that was a situation the service providers could not tolerate. I think it was about two years ago, when Sprint changed their policy. Now they’d be charging me on the order of $5 per month whether I made any long-distance calls or not. It goes without saying that they could not combine my long distance bill with my cellular bill, despite the presence of the word “Sprint” on both of them.
Don’t get me started on my old ISP. Apparently I’m the only person in the USA who insists on paying as I go via monthly billing, as opposed to just giving them my credit card number.
I see questionable business tactics like this becoming more and more frequent. If this trend continues, eventually mega-corps will just send large men with crowbars to our homes to extract money for potential future services. As near as I can figure it’s some weird backlash to being unable to offer a product or service anyone would actually consider paying for.
Congrats on sticking to the mega-corp. If enough consumers do this, maybe we can turn this tide.