Discounts

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Hello, I would like 25 grams of data please!

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Profit graph needs to go up or stakeholders get mad.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

skulblaka

That makes way too much sense.

The infinite growth mindset is the root of all evil

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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.

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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)

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This also works for Employees.

"I’ve been here 15 years. Can I get paid what the new hires get?

“Oh fuck no. No no no. Can’t believe you would ever suggest that.”

Joelk111

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.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

It’s unlikely that your manager determines your pay rate and raises. That’s usually decided well up the chain.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

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.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

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.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

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.

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Change job all few years.

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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.

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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.

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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.