Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Hoonigan
I got £10 off the first bill, so I'm now better off, but how many people don't bother?
Why are we letting companies shaft us like this?
True - its not difficult - but I guess to some people it isn't worth the bother for £10.
O course, what would your reaction be if they sent out the card, but didn't activate (or bill you) for (say) 10 working days after despatch, meaning that you might be without service for a few days?
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
peterb
True - its not difficult - but I guess to some people it isn't worth the bother for £10.
O course, what would your reaction be if they sent out the card, but didn't activate (or bill you) for (say) 10 working days after despatch, meaning that you might be without service for a few days?
I've just moved to Giffgaff. They sent a simple with an activation code printed on the letter it came with. I activated the code through their website and billing began at that point so it's not that hard to solve.
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
spacein_vader
I've just moved to Giffgaff. They sent a simple with an activation code printed on the letter it came with. I activated the code through their website and billing began at that point so it's not that hard to solve.
Yes, that's one solution. And if operators saw a rise in churn towards Giff-Gaff for that reason, then they might do something similiar. It is arguably sharp practice, but not illegal - it just relies on consumer apathy.
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
peterb
True - its not difficult - but I guess to some people it isn't worth the bother for £10.
O course, what would your reaction be if they sent out the card, but didn't activate (or bill you) for (say) 10 working days after despatch, meaning that you might be without service for a few days?
I can see your point there, and of course it's good that the sim card is activated and ready to go straight away, but there's plenty of options available, including calling an automated number to activate the card.
It's the fact that they started the billing on the day I ordered the sim card, meaning that unless I collected the sim card from their warehouse, it's absolutely impossible for me to use it. They didn't actually dispatch it until Wednesday.
Like you say, it's not illegal, just requires some diligence on the consumers part.
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Hoonigan
I got £10 off the first bill, so I'm now better off, but how many people don't bother?
Nice, a tenner would last me months on my Three pay as you go :)
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DanceswithUnix
Nice, a tenner would last me months on my Three pay as you go :)
I've decided to get one of these massive data packages so I have a backup for when my internet goes down.
45GB for £18 per month. 5000 minutes and unlimited texts too.
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Hoonigan
I've recently had an issue with Virgin Mobile, but it turns out that all phone companies are doing this.
I took out a new contract via their website on Monday, then received a bill from them for the first month on Friday.
They had dated the bill from the 24th of September (Monday) and I still hadn't received the sim card on Friday, it arrived today, 7 days later.
The sim card wasn't even dispatched until Wednesday, so what right do they have to charge me for days which I absolutely could not use?
The way I worked it out is:
Let's assume that my contract is fairly average, at £18 per month. That's for a sim-only.
They then charge me for 7 days of usage on that contract which I can't use because the sim card isn't in my possession.
£18 x 12[months] = £216
£216 / 365[days] = 0.59p
£0.59 x 7 = £4.13
So that's £4.13 that they've charged me for something I cannot use.
Let's now assume they get 5,000 new customers per month, that's a fair amount, right?
That works out at just about a quarter of a million pounds that they're getting for absolutely nothing.
And we just accept this? Why? The very first thing I did was ring up and demand that I was not charged for this. The first guy said "This is what all of the operators do, I'm sorry there's nothing we can do" and hung up the phone; so I called back and spoke to someone else in retention after saying I wanted to cancel the contract within the cooling off period and I'd go into a store somewhere and pick up a sim card.
I got £10 off the first bill, so I'm now better off, but how many people don't bother?
Why are we letting companies shaft us like this?
Do you really want to get them back? It will take a bit of effort.
Complain. Tell them that to resolve the complain they must adjust their processes to make sure that this does not happen to other customers again. They simply will not do this. The clock starts ticking before you can raise the complaint to the regulator. Once the time has ran out, raise it with the regulator.
You almost certainly will not force them to change anything but it will be a right PITA for a significant number of employees there. If that practice is widespread however then they just might get in a lot of trouble.
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DanceswithUnix
Nice, a tenner would last me months on my Three pay as you go :)
Me too.
But as Hoonigan's post amply demonstrates, different people use phones in different ways, much ascdifferent people use PC's in different ways. Or for that matter, everything from cars to kitchen equipment.
I don't even use my own PC's now the way I used to 10 or 20 years back, and back then, in the fairly early days of mobile phones, when they were both ecpensive and uncommon, I needed one. Or atca minimum, it gave me a major competit7ve advantage, as did my home-office computer infrastructure.
Nowadays, I don't need about two-thirds of my gear, though as I've got it, I'll use it. But if I was kitting up now, I wouldn't be seeking to achieve the same things, and would be doing it in different ways.
Fact is, I don't need a mobile phone at all, for work, and (I suspect, like you) it's a convenience and little more. As such, a big monthly bill isn't jystified for me and neither is a high-end model.
Also, with that convenience comes the double-edged sword of not just being contactable when it suits me, but also whrn it doesn't. Unless I turn the phone off, in which case, why bother with a big monthly payment or an ecpensive phone.
That said, for many small businesses, they'd struggle to operate without a mobile phone and I fully understand why such people might like dual-SIM phone a big data allowance and, very possibly, no home phone.
For me, minimal outlay matters becsuse I geg minimal benefit, and that's before even thinking about security privacy, etc.
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
badass
....
You almost certainly will not force them to change anything but it will be a right PITA for a significant number of employees there. If that practice is widespread however then they just might get in a lot of trouble.
Amen to that.
Individuals can be easily brushed off but large numbers oc consumers acting in concert, or even alone but in like manners, can force lazy companies to sit up and notice. Especially when it starts costing them.
Re: The rise of anti-consumerism on the internet
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Saracen
Fact is, I don't need a mobile phone at all, for work, and (I suspect, like you) it's a convenience and little more. As such, a big monthly bill isn't jystified for me and neither is a high-end model.
I have a Moto G5 smartphone, I leave mobile data on along with high accuracy location services. It gets used as my satnav not just for driving somewhere new, but on my usual commute using Waze to try and steer me around the inevitable traffic jams on that journey and save me some time. I track exercise with Google Fit. So it does get used quite a bit, I'm not holding back.
It really helps that when at the office I get WiFi, but on Three their topups don't expire and the metering is fair so a tenner gets me 1GB of data minus a few texts (3p each) which lasts me about 3 months. On some sims the same money would last me about 2 weeks, I think most companies just make topup really expensive to push people onto contracts which can be comparatively cheap.
So if you are using over 1GB per month you are probably better off on contract, but I have only managed that when working for a company that didn't give WiFi access.