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RE: Holding Private Companies Accountable ~ Would You Qualify This as "Bait & Switch?"
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: )