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BT borderline fraud

Energy companies seem to be able to manage OK without notice periods, so presumably businesses can operate profitably without them.

Someone's perspective on this is probably heavily influenced by their own approach towards buying services though. I've always tried hard to avoid getting tied up into fixed term deals for anything, never ever had a bank loan or finance, never paid for anything in installments, never leased anything, always paid outright for stuff or gone without if I've not had the money to pay for it upfront.

Two reasons for this, one was my parents drumming into me that borrowing and hire purchase was a mugs game (and my grandmother was fond of quoting Polonius' advice to his son Laertes to ram this point home). The other was that my job was always subject to being moved from one end of the country to the other with 6 weeks notice, so it was inherently risky to have any sort of longer term agreement that might impose a financial penalty for early termination.

As a consequence, the only service agreement I've ever had that has a notice period is the fairly recent one with our current ISP, and that's only because there's no longer any real choice - all the broadband suppliers are intent on making customers haggle to get a normal price by close to doubling the price if you don't agree to being stitched up by them with a fixed term deal.

For at least 50 years or so I've managed to not encounter this 30 day notice thing, and I cannot believe that all the various service providers I've used over the decades have been losing money by not imposing a notice period. Seems to be a recent thing to me, probably only become relatively widespread over the past decade perhaps.
 
Energy companies seem to be able to manage OK without notice periods, so presumably businesses can operate profitably without them.

Someone's perspective on this is probably heavily influenced by their own approach towards buying services though. I've always tried hard to avoid getting tied up into fixed term deals for anything, never ever had a bank loan or finance, never paid for anything in installments, never leased anything, always paid outright for stuff or gone without if I've not had the money to pay for it upfront.

Two reasons for this, one was my parents drumming into me that borrowing and hire purchase was a mugs game (and my grandmother was fond of quoting Polonius' advice to his son Laertes to ram this point home). The other was that my job was always subject to being moved from one end of the country to the other with 6 weeks notice, so it was inherently risky to have any sort of longer term agreement that might impose a financial penalty for early termination.

As a consequence, the only service agreement I've ever had that has a notice period is the fairly recent one with our current ISP, and that's only because there's no longer any real choice - all the broadband suppliers are intent on making customers haggle to get a normal price by close to doubling the price if you don't agree to being stitched up by them with a fixed term deal.

For at least 50 years or so I've managed to not encounter this 30 day notice thing, and I cannot believe that all the various service providers I've used over the decades have been losing money by not imposing a notice period. Seems to be a recent thing to me, probably only become relatively widespread over the past decade perhaps.
Given that 90% of new cars get bought with finance and combined with your other behavoirs that puts you in the rarity category. There is nothing wrong with being different though, each can live their life the way they want, that's called freedom. Having said that you have to take some responsibility for not being exposed to things that most people have due to the way you decide to act. Also while you may have enojoyed a lot of flexibility on not commiting yourself to longer term service contracts there is no doubt you have spent a lot more money that you would otherwise if you went for fixed term service contracts. Particularly in the last two decades service companies have made it a big push to discount (or to penalise the ones that don't, whichever way you want to see it as) customers that commit to longer term contracts.

As it is you actually found out about the 30 days notice now as you engaged with this forum looking for a solution for your SMS problem. And to me that is where this comes out to. A lot of people don't know about these things because they don't bother to research whether they are paying a fair price for their service contract and whether they should change service providers. Granted, some people are elderly, vulnerable or don't the means to do it but still they could ask for help and they don't. The rest (which is the majority) claims they are too busy to do it. Funny thing is that we all get the same 24hs per day, how you decide spend your day is up to you, but there is always time to do things. So to me people that claim they don't have time and the system is unfair are looking for excuses. It certainly takes an effort to be on top of your finances, but it's not imposible and it does pay its dividends.
 
Given that 90% of new cars get bought with finance and combined with your other behavoirs that puts you in the rarity category. There is nothing wrong with being different though, each can live their life the way they want, that's called freedom. Having said that you have to take some responsibility for not being exposed to things that most people have due to the way you decide to act. Also while you may have enojoyed a lot of flexibility on not commiting yourself to longer term service contracts there is no doubt you have spent a lot more money that you would otherwise if you went for fixed term service contracts. Particularly in the last two decades service companies have made it a big push to discount (or to penalise the ones that don't, whichever way you want to see it as) customers that commit to longer term contracts.

As it is you actually found out about the 30 days notice now as you engaged with this forum looking for a solution for your SMS problem. And to me that is where this comes out to. A lot of people don't know about these things because they don't bother to research whether they are paying a fair price for their service contract and whether they should change service providers. Granted, some people are elderly, vulnerable or don't the means to do it but still they could ask for help and they don't. The rest (which is the majority) claims they are too busy to do it. Funny thing is that we all get the same 24hs per day, how you decide spend your day is up to you, but there is always time to do things. So to me people that claim they don't have time and the system is unfair are looking for excuses. It certainly takes an effort to be on top of your finances, but it's not imposible and it does pay its dividends.


Not sure how old you are, but I suspect an age difference may colour our differing views. I doubt I've spent more by always paying upfront for everything. For most of my life companies offered incentives for doing this, especially when buying cars. It's only relatively recently that car dealers have turned into finance re-sellers that make more money on finance commission than they do on sales, for example.

Not universal yet, though, as when I bought a Tesla a few years ago there was one price for everyone. Buying it on finance or lease cost the same, or more, than buying it for cash. When I bought my present car in early 2021 the dealer knocked nearly £30k off the list price, as the pandemic meant that Jaguar were desperate to get shot of their backlog of new cars. I know that the trend now is to buy on PCP or whatever, but even if I was comfortable with this approach at my age there is always the lingering question at the back on my mind as to whether I'll see out the period of the agreement!

As for ISPs, then if I had the choice I would avoid any of them that play the daft and very annoying "haggle with us for the best price" game every year or two. Used to be a time when companies recognised that attracting new customers was a costly business, so they would offer discounts to get existing customers to continue to do business with them. Not sure what's changed, but it seems that many now penalise loyalty. Presumably the cost of advertising and signing up new customers must have dropped substantially, as otherwise I can't see the logic behind it.
 
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Not sure how old you are, but I suspect an age difference may colour our differing views. I doubt I've spent more by always paying upfront for everything. For most of my life companies offered incentives for doing this, especially when buying cars. It's only relatively recently that car dealers have turned into finance re-sellers that make more money on finance commission than they do on sales, for example.
Close to 50.
Not universal yet, though, as when I bought a Tesla a few years ago there was one price for everyone. Buying it on finance or lease cost the same, or more, than buying it for cash. When I bought my present car in early 2020 the dealer knocked nearly £30k off the list price, as the pandemic meant that Jaguar were desperate to get shot of their backlog of new cars. I know that the trend now is to buy on PCP or whatever, but even if I was comfortable with this approach at my age there is always the lingering question at the back on my mind as to whether I'll see out the period of the agreement!
The only new car I bought in my life I got 0% on my PCP. I certainly may have been able to get a discount paying but I didn't have that option. When the ballon payment was due I didn't have the money to paid it off so I took a personal loan which was way cheaper than any of the PCP plans the dealer or independent PCP companies were offering.
As for ISPs, then if I had the choice I would avoid any of them that play the daft and very annoying "haggle with us for the best price" game every year or two. Used to be a time when companies recognised that attracting new customers was a costly business, so they would offer discounts to get existing customers to continue to do business with them. Not sure what's changed, but it seems that many now penalise loyalty. Presumably the cost of advertising and signing up new customers must have dropped substantially, as otherwise I can't see the logic behind it.
Penalising loyalty has become the norm as companies have realised there is much more money in catching the lazy and the ones that can't/won't/aren't able to switch than being fair with customers and reward loyalty. If we all did our homework and switched every time we got mistreated with unresonable renewal fees then the companies would have no other option but to go back to rewarding loyalty as customer adquisition would be become too expensive and their customer base would be too unstable.
 
Let's just say that I've been a pensioner for a bit over 13 years and so have a few years on you!

I've bought new cars every three or four years or so for decades now. Used to be because I did a lot of miles every year and wanted reliability and warranty cover. Now it's as much about having the reassurance of a long warranty as anything else (plus I like shiny new toys, who doesn't!).

I first encountered the loyalty penalty thing with car insurance four or five years ago. Company I'd used for many years suddenly whacked up the renewal premium, whereas in the past it had barely changed from one year to the next. Rang them to question it and they immediately offered me the same cover for a lot less. Since then I've played the silly game of getting quotes every year when renewal comes around, then calling them to get them to match the best price.

To be fair they always do match it, but it's a faff I could do without, it's like a childish game we have to play out every year. They could just offer me the price I'm going to pay them from the outset, and save all this pointless and time consuming faffing about. They know that I do the haggling thing with them every year, so should realise I'm not going to be suckered into paying more than I have to. In fact any company that did offer to always match the best price and do so without me needing to call them and haggle would definitely get my business.

Plusnet are the same, every year or so they try and nearly double the price, I ring them and they immediately back down and offer a much lower price. It's a bloody stupid farce having to go through this charade just to pay a fair price, and also makes me very reluctant to ever recommend them to anyone else.
 
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If you rarely changed providers you are already paying a penalty because you are not getting the best value for your money.
For some people, it's not really feasible to switch plans, especially when there's not much competition.

I live in an urban area and Virgin Media offers gigabit broadband here (I assume through HFC), meanwhile Openreach offers 24mbps max. If I was to leave Virgin, my only options would really to explore Three 5G or Vodafone 5G. There's no chance of going to O2 considering how unreliable for speeds that is, and Three's signal strength here will be better than what I would get with EE (if there was even an MVNO that I knew of that did unlimited mobile broadband, shame 1pmobiles max is 200GB).

Also, you're not always necessarily paying a penalty for not switching. As an example, since August 2018, my phone plan was with Virgin Mobile. 2GB for £5/mo on a 12 month contract. I didn't once try to switch providers or change my plan, and in May, I'm now paying £6.79 for unlimited O2 data. I haven't seen anyone pay less than that here for O2 (only cheaper unlimited plans I've seen here overall are Three Business plans for £5). My Virgin Media is already locked in at a decent enough price as well, £27 or so for M125 (in fact, taking a quick glance at what the main ispreview.co.uk site shows, I am getting better than what's advertised).
 
If you don't like long contracts and mid-term price increases Which? have a campaign that was mention on ISPReview and I mention here: Other Post
You might like to sign the Which? petition if you agree....
 
If you don't like long contracts and mid-term price increases Which? have a campaign that was mention on ISPReview and I mention here: Other Post
You might like to sign the Which? petition if you agree....
It’s worth noting that a lot of service companies do offer monthly contracts but they do not advertise them nor let you buy them online. But they are available (at a higher price of course) of you call them up.
 
I wonder what the logical reason is for some companies charging more for a monthly deal?

Had our windows and solar panels cleaned today. Same chap that we always use. He doesn't give a discount if I were to sign up to use his services for a longer period. Same goes for the chap that's coming around on Wednesday to cut our hedging and trim some trees. We use his services two or three times a year but again he doesn't discount his prices if we were to sign up to use him for the whole of next year.

The reality is that the "discount" offered by ISPs, insurers and maybe one or two others is, in reality, a form of scam. What they are doing is fleecing those that don't remember to ring them and haggle for a better deal. The fact that Plusnet always, without fail, just drop the price (a lot) every time I ring them proves this. I get the feeling their call centre people have the real prices they should charge as a standard script that they read out every time someone calls.

What irritates is that they know full well I'm going to call them and get the normal (rather than obscenely inflated) price. I've done this two or three times now, and if they don't have records showing this then I'd be gobsmacked. I've just about had enough of having to go through this charade, and although Plusnet's service has been OK I think it's about time I switched just so I can give them feedback that I find their sharp practice offensive. Can't think of another way to get the message across.

I bet a fair bit of their call centre cost is taken up by all the tens of thousands of their customers calling to go through this charade. Probably increases their overheads, which begs the question as to whether they might be more profitable if they adopted a fair pricing policy.
 
Folks cleaning our wheelie bins offer a discount for prepayment.

Gives assurance of an income and a more stable revenue stream.

Businesses demanding customers call them to negotiate the standard price is a massive bugbear. They think their prices are reasonable they should tell folks calling up to go forth else offer those prices as standard.
 
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