Ahh yes, just like employment. You get nothing for loyalty.
Literally just got off the phone with Sky where our package was costing £77. Told them we were going to cancel and just start a new account in my name instead of my wife’s to get the new customer deals and they just dropped the contract to £33 instead for the exact same thing.
Then they are idiots . Happy for them to overpay to keep prices down for the test of us!
It’s what I call the ‘Convenience Tax’ – I’m happy to go through the inconvenience of shopping around, so I pay £22 per month for Broadband & got £60 cash back to do so. I’ll do the same shopping around in 12 month or so when the contract expires.
Service providers rely on your laziness, forgetfulness, or the convenience of them simply renewing and ‘sorting it all for you’ while charging you through the teeth for it.
One thing I’d love to legislate is for companies to have to mandatorily disclose what the maximum they are charging for customers and what is the minimum for the same product as one is getting.
whole system set up to promote competition as judged by number of people flipping. except that’s not real competition.
i can understand it in terms of stopping a juggernaut from stomping all over newcomers by offering unrealistically low prices for a couple of years at a loss decades ago.. but it has just been skewing things.
Virgin Media wanted 70 odd quid for my package. I told the cancellation department I was just going to cancel my account and reapply for the Student package i’d been using at £42. Got told i’d have no internet, and when i harked back with “I’ll just use a cheap rolling contract until I can make a new account then?” they dropped my price back down to £42.
They genuinely pray on the fact that some people wont just leave.
I change car insurance every year, I’m in my 6th year of driving and it’s dropped by 100£ or more every time. Automatic renewals either keep the same price or drop it by a small amount.
How much of it is ‘loyalty’ when they make it as hard as humanly possible to cancel?
Because you’re supposed to sign a contract. It baffles me people don’t know this.
Yes, your Virgin/Sky whatever will go up to £70-80-90 PCM at the end of your fixed contract, because you can leave them at a whim and go wherever. You phone up and threaten to cancel because they then lock you in at a new 12-18-24 month contract at a more reasonable cost, knowing you can no longer leave them without severe penalty.
I call it the laziness penalty. If it wasn’t already obvious that these for profit companies will increase your costs once you are out of contract, they do actually state it when you sign up in the first place.
If you forget or can’t be bothered to call them up to renegotiate, they’ve got you exactly where they want you. All it takes to be savvy is using the reminders app on your phone to notify you when your contracts are due to expire.
A lot of companies still pretend to be your friend, making ‘wholesome’ ads with adored British celebrities doing normal things. People need to remember that companies do not like them, only the money they give to them. You are just data in a spreadsheet to them otherwise.
12 comments
Ahh yes, just like employment. You get nothing for loyalty.
Literally just got off the phone with Sky where our package was costing £77. Told them we were going to cancel and just start a new account in my name instead of my wife’s to get the new customer deals and they just dropped the contract to £33 instead for the exact same thing.
Then they are idiots . Happy for them to overpay to keep prices down for the test of us!
It’s what I call the ‘Convenience Tax’ – I’m happy to go through the inconvenience of shopping around, so I pay £22 per month for Broadband & got £60 cash back to do so. I’ll do the same shopping around in 12 month or so when the contract expires.
Service providers rely on your laziness, forgetfulness, or the convenience of them simply renewing and ‘sorting it all for you’ while charging you through the teeth for it.
One thing I’d love to legislate is for companies to have to mandatorily disclose what the maximum they are charging for customers and what is the minimum for the same product as one is getting.
whole system set up to promote competition as judged by number of people flipping. except that’s not real competition.
i can understand it in terms of stopping a juggernaut from stomping all over newcomers by offering unrealistically low prices for a couple of years at a loss decades ago.. but it has just been skewing things.
Virgin Media wanted 70 odd quid for my package. I told the cancellation department I was just going to cancel my account and reapply for the Student package i’d been using at £42. Got told i’d have no internet, and when i harked back with “I’ll just use a cheap rolling contract until I can make a new account then?” they dropped my price back down to £42.
They genuinely pray on the fact that some people wont just leave.
I change car insurance every year, I’m in my 6th year of driving and it’s dropped by 100£ or more every time. Automatic renewals either keep the same price or drop it by a small amount.
How much of it is ‘loyalty’ when they make it as hard as humanly possible to cancel?
Because you’re supposed to sign a contract. It baffles me people don’t know this.
Yes, your Virgin/Sky whatever will go up to £70-80-90 PCM at the end of your fixed contract, because you can leave them at a whim and go wherever. You phone up and threaten to cancel because they then lock you in at a new 12-18-24 month contract at a more reasonable cost, knowing you can no longer leave them without severe penalty.
I call it the laziness penalty. If it wasn’t already obvious that these for profit companies will increase your costs once you are out of contract, they do actually state it when you sign up in the first place.
If you forget or can’t be bothered to call them up to renegotiate, they’ve got you exactly where they want you. All it takes to be savvy is using the reminders app on your phone to notify you when your contracts are due to expire.
A lot of companies still pretend to be your friend, making ‘wholesome’ ads with adored British celebrities doing normal things. People need to remember that companies do not like them, only the money they give to them. You are just data in a spreadsheet to them otherwise.