Welcome to Something for Nothing

I think everyone that knows me would agree that I’m a pretty frugal guy. I have a couple things that I don’t mind spending money on, but mostly I just don’t spend money unless there is an absolute need. However, I do have one major weakness. It’s my high speed internet connection. My wife and I have to have it. Sure, I could justify it for my work (and man I wish that my work payed for my home internet like they did at my last job). However, really it’s all about my need for speed on the internet.

Well, guess what? I’m in Las Vegas where there is almost no competition in the broadband internet marketplace. I couldn’t believe it either. It made sense when I lived on the North Shore of Hawaii. It doesn’t make sense in glittering Las Vegas. We basically only have 2 choices for broadband internet in Las Vegas: Cox - Cable Internet and Sprint (or Embarq) - DSL.

I’d been paying $50 a month for Cox’s middle package and I was tired of spending so much. Sprint commercials were saying only $25 a month and that sounded good. $25 savings a month is $300 over the year. That’s a lot of dates with my wife. My wife left town and I was stuck at home with my son so I decided to call Cox and tell them that I was thinking about switching to Sprint. I couldn’t have made a better decision.

I guess in the call center industry they use the term Churn to describe what I did. Call it churn if you like, but I call it genius. Really, I should have known what to expect. I worked at Discover card in the call center and I knew that if it got to my supervisor then they would more than likely hook the person up. If it got to their supervisor then you were absolutely going to get a refund and possibly some extra cash on top of that. It was literally the company’s policy. He told us that if he talked to them, then they were getting hooked up.

Well, it took me 3 phone calls and a number of “I’m really serious about wanting to switch.” to get through, but I did it. The key was to find a reason why I could talk to their supervisor. My reason was that one person told me they could give me a deal and then after they transferred me they said I couldn’t. Booyah!! Give me your supervisor. Turns out Cox actually transferred me to customer service where I again asked for a supervisor. Well, she was busy, but she’d given permission to cut my payment down to $25 a month for 6 months.

I should have known it would work, but I still couldn’t believe it when they actually did it. Did I feel good? Not really. I loved the new rate and still felt like the company was getting paid well for what I was getting. However, it wasn’t what I’d call fun. Hopefully it’s kind of like pregnancy and child rearing. After 6 months you start to forget about how painful and difficult it was.