Holding Private Companies Accountable ~ Would You Qualify This as "Bait & Switch?"
For as much as I detest violent monopolies and cheer for free markets, this does not mean that every private company is always perfect. In fact, they can get away with some pretty terrible business practices, that is if the consumer (the market) doesn't let other consumers know about their experiences. So with that said, I am going to share a personal story of how I feel my wife and I were misled and taken advantage of, courtesy of T-Mobile.
I started a new job a few months back, and had to return my work cell phone. The service provider at my work was T-Mobile. My wife was on a subsidiary of Sprint, called TING. A pay as you go kind of service. The salesman at the T-Mobile store showed us a promotion they were running. It went like this: BOGO iPhone 8, exchange a qualifying iPhone (we did, an iPhone 5 which qualified) and port in a # from a different company (we did, my wife's # came from TING, a subsidiary of Sprint). How the BOGO worked was that we had to pay the tax up front on $1500 ($750 per iphone8) and then they would mail out 4-8 weeks later a gift card worth $750 that we could use anywhere, or to pay off one of the phones. I'm not big on having the newest and fancy things (like the newest iPhone) but my wife is and you know what they say, happy wife, happy life. And tbh, it was a decent deal. It was 0% for 2 years, so they essentially financed it up front. We were happy to be done with the whole switching phone carrier ordeal, it seems to always take for ever and never goes right.
Fast forward 6 weeks later, we were happy as clams waiting for the gift card to come in the mail, when my wife gets a voice mail from a representative at T-Mobile stating that "We did not qualify for the BOGO offer, have a good day." Ummmmm…..what?!?. Her reason was that TING was not a subscriber that was listed in the terms and conditions. If it would have been Sprint it would have been fine, but TING didn't qualify.
BUT!!! This was not what I was told by all 5 salesmen I talked to at the store. They specifically stated..."You will have your gift card in 4-8 weeks". There was no "you might get your gift card" or "there is a chance you won't get your gift card". It was a slam dunk "you will get your gift card in 4-8 weeks!". No if's, and's, or but's about it. Do you honestly think I would have signed up for a BOGO deal if there was any chance what so ever of not qualifying???
You can probably imagine my chagrin when my wife told me this. So I called the salesman who signed us up and he says "I imagine why you're calling is because you didn't get your gift card?" Ah, yeah, no shit sherlock. He gets back to me and says he's blaming corporate and they're blaming him. I don't really care, not my problem, get me what you said I would get.
At some point I get offered a $700 credit to go towards my account, for the mishap. I say no thank you, that's not what we agreed to. He says he'll talk to his manager and call me back.
A week goes by with nothing.
I call back and speak to another salesman that was there, he says he'll leave a message for the other salesman and the manager. No response for 2 weeks. Nothing.
I call back. Speak to the same guy who said he left the note for his co-workers. He makes some calls and calls me back with an offer for an $800 credit towards my account. Um, no. That's not what the agreement was.
I spend the next 2 hours on the phone getting transferred back and forth between customer service, T-Mobile's rebate center, and their retention department. I offered 2 solutions to this problem,
#1: Get me the gift card of $750 that I was promised and we will have no more issues.
OR
#2: I will return both iphone8's, cancel our service, and I want my (or a new, since they probably already salvaged mine) iphone5 back, and we will take our business elsewhere.
source
The reason I see this as a Bait & Switch is that they promised me something and then switched it on the back end. They turned a gift card worth $750 that could be spent ANYWHERE into a CREDIT at THEIR company. Dealing with all this phone crap is so annoying that I am tempted to just take their stupid credit and be done with this because it has been such a drain. But at the same time, the principle still stands. This is terrible business ethics.
If I offered you a deal such as: Buy X and in 6 weeks I'll give you a $100 gift card and you agree. But 6 weeks comes up and I now say, "you can only use this gift card to buy more of X", you would probably feel cheated, no?
A new manager started at the store and he was lucky enough to get me on the phone for his first day. He said there is nothing he could do regarding the gift card and his only recourse was giving a credit. I doubt I can get my Iphone5 back even if we cancel, so I feel like I'm losing regardless.
His only other solution (which puts a lot more work on my plate) is to take the credit offered and cancel the service, and then sell one of the iphones on the open market to pay off the remaining balance, thus leaving us with one iPhone 8. UGH. I'm not sure what to do.
Any input, suggestions, or legal advice from anyone out in Steemlandia? I would appreciate any and all wisdom. Thank you for reading.
Lame. Corporate crooks are all too common.
My last phone company experience involved Sprint's network mysteriously refusing to deliver text messages until I took them up on their texted offer for a free upgrade to a free new phone. (At the time, I was using text verification to authenticate Coinbase logins ... and desperately needed to sell some coin.)
Long story short: the free upgrade cost $75, the free new phone ran another $450, and everyone at the Sprint store seemed shocked that I expected the term "free" to mean "without financial cost".
Extremely lame. I feel that that bigger the company, the easier it is for them to get away with it because even they don't know how to handle certain situations, like this one for example. You just get sent round and round to anyone with a pulse, eventually spending so much time on the phone you'll accept any reasonable solution just to be done with it.
HAHA! I'm sorry to be laughing at your misfortune, but I can imagine this playing out in my head. Free never seem to actually mean free anymore.
To be honest, it was pretty funny. I was losing money every minute I couldn't get into that coinbase account due to Sprint's network not delivering texts to my phone anymore (which I later found out was one of the company's standard practices to force phone upgrades even when they are totally unnecessary). With my LTC essentially held hostage by Sprint, I rushed to the closest store to get their stupid upgrade. And the young lady who initially was helping me was super nice about everything until she said, "That'll be six hundred dollars. How would you like to pay?"
And I said, "Uhh, wtf are you talking about? As I explained, I'm here for my free upgrade to a free new phone. So ... are you telling me it's not free?"
"Oh it's free," she said. "And your total is six hundred dollars. How would you like to pay?"
"How is it free if it costs hundreds of dollars?"
"Well," she explained as if speaking to a small child, "The free phone costs $XXX and the free upgrade costs $XX."
We went round and round like that until I mentioned that lying about the cost of a product to entice a sale is widely considered fraud. Then she ran away (literally) and a big tatted-up dude came out from some back office to deal with me because I was acting like a 'problem customer'. Fortunately, this guy understood basic stuff like the meanings of words, and he had no problem selling me a new phone while acknowledging that the company was being run by crooks and hucksters: )