I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit over the last couple of weeks trying to negotiate lower rates on several of our bills that have managed to creep up over the years.
The worst of these are always because of promotional pricing where they offer you a reasonable price to get their foot in the door and then jack up the rates a year from now when you’re not expecting it. This concept has always been popular with cable companies with the argument that everybody does it that way, which I’ve always thought was in such poor taste because it basically prioritizes new customers over ones who’ve tried your services and actually want to stick around!
Doesn’t it make sense to reward a customer’s loyalty instead of penalizing them for it???
My preference is really simple – instead of having promotional pricing and the non-discounted rate, just pick something in the middle and that’s your price. It still needs to be competitive enough against other providers, but if one company stops making people chase and fight for discounts, the others will have no choice but to follow.
But you rely on the customers who won’t ask about a discount and just accept the higher price???
Frankly, that just sounds shady to me because eventually those people are going to see an ad showing your newest prices and realize that their bill is way higher, and then what? Then you’ll consider offering them some credits to consider staying when if you had just done the right thing in the first place, they’d more likely be bragging about the affordability of your service instead of complaining about it!
So just for the sake of throwing some numbers out there, here’s what I’ve been through recently…
Frontier Fiber – monthly bill dropped from $114.99 to $89.99 for 5 Gbps service ($300 annual savings)
Chat was useless here, but calling in was a simple, 5-minute call and the guy even noticed an issue with auto-pay that would save me even more money!
Verizon – monthly bill dropped from $191 to $131 for two lines, included dropping insurance ($720 annual savings)
Here I did everything via chat, which was kind of hit and miss – some were like talking to an AI and didn’t do squat, while others went above and beyond and actually got the job done. FWIW, I should’ve been able to apply these same discounts myself through their website or app, but both were broken.
New York Times – monthly bill was $4/mo, to increase to $24.99/mo – extended discount for another year ($300 annual savings)
This one was by far the easiest because I subscribed through the App Store, so as soon as I clicked the cancel button, it came back offering me the exact same promotion as before!
Orlando Sentinel – annual bill was $3/year, to increase to $19.99/mo – found a new discount for only $1/year ($240 annual savings)
Admittedly annoying because the Sentinel makes you call in to cancel your account and won’t let you do it online, but because I already had a new subscription, the call was a little easier … and actually amusing when the rep tried to pitch me their current promotions, first at $15/mo and then $3.50/week … still not cheaper than a buck a year!
I think the newspaper ones in particular are a great example of how messed up their pricing model is because obviously having customers pay $1/year isn’t sustainable, but neither is expecting them to jump from $1/year to $300/year at the blink of an eye when that promotional pricing expires!
If they would just pick something reasonable – maybe $10/mo for a national paper and $5/mo for local news, I’d be fine with paying those rates knowing that I’m actually helping to keep them afloat. But these days when I’ll read articles from a handful of different papers, plus a bunch of websites if they weren’t all behind paywalls, it’s just not reasonable for each one of them to expect $15 or even $25/mo from anyone who wants to read.
I can’t tell you how many stories I click on, only to immediately close them back out because I’m not paying a fee to every damn website that I visit! I might read more of my hometown’s newspaper if they didn’t do that, but I’m not paying extra just for random curiosity at 2am in Northern Michigan. I honestly think that having so much information behind paywalls is a big part of our misinformed populace today, though that’s a rant for a very different blog post!
So the good news is, I saved about $1,500 for the upcoming year by lowering these four bills.
The bad news is, had they just offered reasonable pricing to begin with, I’d have hours of my life back by not spending going back and forth with customer service reps and awful AI chatbots.