Verizon 4G and Customer Disservice
On December 6 I stopped by a Verizon store to purchase a new 4G card for my MacBook Pro. They promised me up and down that it worked with OS X. I signed the two-year contract, took the upgrade, and discovered it didn’t work with OS X at all. The Verizon store refused to believe this, and so I got to waste two hours while they tried everything and discovered it didn’t work. They ultimately called a couple of tiers of customer support above the local store, who told them “no, it doesn’t work on OS X, none of our marketing material says it works on OS X, why did you tell this customer it works on OS X?”
The problem was I had already entered into a new contract. They could restore my old 3G service contract, but I’d still be tied into two years, whereas before I’d been out-of-contract and on month-to-month. Now, I don’t know if this is official Verizon policy or if it’s just the mouthbreathing simpering morons I was working with — but that, brothers and sisters, is called bait and switch, and it is absolutely illegal under fair trade law.
Unfortunately, given the total epic disaster that’s our legal system, an individual consumer’s ability to get justice in the court system is … pretty much exactly zero. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation and realized I’d be looking at a $10K legal bill minimum. Not worth it, not even a little bit.
So I instead asked if I could cancel my 3G data plan entirely. They said sure, they could do that. The next thing I did was look at upgrading my Droid to a Droid X, to make use of its mobile wifi capability. The price of the Droid X was clearly marked: $199. “Ah, but that’s the price for people who are coming into new contracts. You bought your Droid just over a year ago. Your price is $250.”
Note well, Dear Reader: I am now paying $250 to upgrade a phone I don’t need upgraded to recover a capability I already had before these morons sold me a useless 4G card.
But what are my other options? That, or else $10K for legal fees?
So, fine, fine. Once it got rung up, I discovered the next problem: my price was $350. You see, Verizon requires you to give them an interest-free $100 loan. You pay $100 more than list price, and you get a $100 debit card back in the mail a few weeks later, after you clip UPC codes and staple things together and fill out forms and send things in.
Verizon has a great network, but Verizon doesn’t have customers. Verizon has hostages.
Please, feel free to link far and wide. Before anyone signs up with Verizon, I hope they read this and think long and hard. As soon as my contract comes up, I’m jumping ship to some other carrier. I cannot abide the thought of dealing with Verizon any longer.
Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?
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