Board 8 > Hurray jumping through cable company hoops.

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So if you remember my grandpa died back on Thanksgiving, we got the funeral and crap taken care of, and then the holidays kind of caught up on us and you cant do much til the mortuary hooks you up with a big pile of expensive pieces of paper that certify a person is good and dead. So the family kind of agreed to put off all the essential stuff til everyone got all their gifts and everything.

So with Christmas in the rearview mirror it was time today to start getting some bills switched over. The utilities and stuff are a little complicated, so I decided to start at the more outrageously expensive stuff, phone and cable. Now, my grandpa wasn't on the cell phone bill but with my grandpa paying all the other crap there was plenty of money to go around so I kind of just let it go. But with more bills and me being an inherently cheap person, I was going to call and chip as much from our family plan on verizon as I could. Ended up knocking $60 a month off our bill and switching from a limited(12 GB, quite a bit, but still) data plan to an unlimited data plan(Which also gets a year free of Disney+, hurray!). Despite basically also being a cable company for whatever reason cell phone carriers are easier to deal with.

Next we get the cable company. This is where things get complicated. As you may know, they offer their best deals to new customers, and my grandpa, who liked throwing money around, didn't pay attention to the fact that our original bill with Time Warner, which was like $120 a month had turned into a $260 a month monstrocity with Spectrum(I told him I'd call for him and get it lowered he said don't bother). That is fucking insane. So I call, and I tell them my grandpa is dead and the easy way to do things is for them to transfer the account to us but lower our bill to something comparable to new pricing. This means no shuffling of equipment or install for us or them. They talk to a supervisor, tell us they'll call us back they cant handle it from there.

Fine. They call back. They tell us they'll switch over the account for us. Now, theres a trick here, switching over the account makes the new account owner ineligible for new customer pricing. I know this, they know this. I tell them we won't switch the account unless they are talking price. They tell us they don't handle that there. So I tell them, the alternative is we just cancel service and reup. They say ok, bring your equipment in to our office and they'll handle cancellation.

So rather than seamlessly transition, tomorrow I bring all the equipment back to Spectrum, where I will also be picking up what is likely exactly the same equipment to setup the exact same service under a different name for pretty much half the price(Actually probably going to drop a few premium movie channels we havent watched in months).

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I've found that if you threaten that you're cancelling your service and going to a different company they will usually fold pretty quick and offer you 'new customer' pricing.

At least that's my interactions with comcast. I call at the end of every pricing deal and just quote the price of a competitor and 30 minutes later it's figured out.

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Aecioo posted...

I've found that if you threaten that you're cancelling your service and going to a different company they will usually fold pretty quick and offer you 'new customer' pricing.

They wont negotiate til we switch the account over. Switching the account over would risk them not wanting to give us new customer pricing(Especially since we are an old Time Warner Cable customer on a grandfathered plan, this makes this complicated).

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Did your grandfather live with you?

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Aecioo posted...

I've found that if you threaten that you're cancelling your service and going to a different company they will usually fold pretty quick and offer you 'new customer' pricing.

Assuming there's actually a competitor.

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We have Frontier as a competitor.

Obviously it would be an empty threat as Frontier runs on old Verizon FIOS infrastructure that was too expensive for Verizon to upkeep and Frontier well, they aren't exactly investing in that department. They still lock customers into 2 year contracts as well.

But I mean, a regional sports network monopoly assures we wont actually switch off of Spectrum. But at least the threat is there for me to pull out every year.

The alternative is cancel Spectrum every year and put it in a new name, since after 12 months you are eligible for new customer status again.

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what sports do you care about?

i honestly think it might be cheaper to just go watch the games at a bar or something

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The Dodgers are on a sports network owned by Spectrum and current available through...Spectrum.

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