posted by [identity profile] brit-will.livejournal.com at 01:30am on 24/12/2002
ok, but there's room for negotiation. if she'd managed to talk me into a 30 or 35 quid a month contract, she could have maybe offered me the phone for 100-130 ish surely? that way that's only a 40quid difference between the RRP and her sale price, and she's got me on a much higher contract at the same time...

but just saying 230 (or even 180) or no deal... is a bit pants...
 
posted by [identity profile] phil99.livejournal.com at 03:05am on 24/12/2002
But you can change your priceplan once a month. That's a no-go. You could spend one month on anytime max (75 quid) and then move to a 13 a month plan.

The idea is that Upgrades are completely seperate from anything else. You can upgrade and everything about your account stays the same, apart from the phone we have on record for you, obviously.

And why should the company be willing to negotiate? Do you haggle with safeway? ("I spend £30 a week in here on my groceries, I want a free tin of beans?"). Do you ask BT (or NTL) for a new phone every year?

"That's only £40 difference...." - fine, but your line rental and call charges have to be used primarily to cover our network costs and your call charges (outbound interconnects, mainly). Only after those are covered can we start to work on your subsidy. This means that £40 can take a long time to recover unless you are spending a fair bit o'cash.

It's a pet peeve of mine. People who come on and say "when can I get my free upgrade?". Uhhm, you can't. You really expect something for nothing?
 
posted by [identity profile] brit-will.livejournal.com at 04:11am on 24/12/2002
which is why the constant swing happens. people want new phones, the shops (with their commissions) are screaming out saying "have this for free / really cheap when you sign up with this network" and people keep switching and getting new numbers....

which from an industry wide standpoint isn't very sensible. from a single network point of view, maybe, for all the reasons listed above, but industry-wide i think it's really dumb that to keep getting a nicer phone you have to keep dropping everything you have and starting all over again...

if you say to t-mobile. i am a T-Mobile customer, i'm quite happy T-Mobile, but my handset is old/scratched/buggered-up/can't do WAP/photo messaging, and they are basically saying "We don't care. If you want a better one go and become a customer somewhere else. Just don't nag us about it" and then 2 years later, after being on Orange, they do the same, and you come back to T-Mobile, (or even go with Voda/O2 if yer desperate and feeling rich)... how is it that the network can afford to pay the retailers such a big commission that they can knock down the prices, but can't afford to knock down the prices themselves even when there is no commission involved. you can say, existing customer, no need to entice them, but if i drop my sub, i'm not an existing customer any more, and i need to be enticed back. would they really rather not be getting any money from me, and their competitors be getting the money? i don't think so... every customer they retain is one less person going elsewhere...

there was a sainsburys in purley for years and years right. then a big tesco's opened, and everyone switched to shopping there apart from about 10 old grannies a day. except that sainsburys kept that store open, running at a loss, (its probably still there now) just because every pound they took in there, was one pound less that tesco's had taken. not good business sense maybe, but i'm sure tesco's would have liked that money and for the sainsburys to be long gone... likewise if T-Mobile suddenly went bust I don't think the others would be exactly complaining...

i'm sorry for dragging this out, but i'm sitting at work and they've got 3 of us here (on the german line) and so far we've had no calls, so i'm very very bored.
 
posted by [identity profile] phil99.livejournal.com at 03:38pm on 28/12/2002
Why do we pay subsidies and commission to dealers?
New customers. We can claim x thousand new customers a month...

I think that says it all.

Secondly... On the industrywide thing - maybe, but the same happens in every industry. Look at your BT, your sky and your electricity. They all offer you incentives to sign up and then won't offer you anything further when you are an existing customer.

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