On top of everything else going wrong, my Direct TV reception started going on and off two days ago, alternating between no signal, intermittent signals, and stuttering signals. It started during an overcast night with occasional rain, but continued the next day, with clear skies but high winds. So I called customer service, found my way to tech support, and was on hold for 40 minutes, being told every five minutes that my estimated wait was 10 minutes, then told for another 15 minutes that it would be a five minute wait, and so on. There were 8 “30 second” waits.
The representative was nice, and told me that it sounded like they needed to check out the dish. This, he said, would cost $99 dollars. I asked why that was, since I paid for their service and wasn’t getting it, in addition to the fact that I had not been charged the last time someone had to adjust the dish. Whereupon he said, “Oh! Then there will be no charge.” And he set up the appointment.
What is that? A weenie test? A scam? If I hadn’t objected, I would have paid $99. Are we back to the Middle Easter bazaar, where no price is set and we have to haggle over everything?
What’s happening????
Ethics Alarms 
I’m thinking just a brain fart moment where he missed something looking at your account. I’ve had that happen occasionally in my customer service jobs where I start to say something which is normal procedure but didn’t actually apply in a specific customer’s situation, then correct myself when I or the customer catches the error.
It’s a 100 buck brain fart, like over-charging 100 bucks for groceries. How much money do they make on such brain farts when customers are submissive and believe what they’re told?
I was staying at a hotel after a wedding once, and had to use the room phone to call home because I misplaced my phone, and wasn’t sure if it made it back to the room with me. My family called my cell, I found it, thanked them, and went to bed.
When I paid my credit card later that month, I noticed a $50 charge from the hotel. I called the desk, and they said, “Ah, yes, I see you made an international call!”
After a dumbfounded pause, I said I made an in-state call. They reversed the charges.
At least I wasn’t on hold for long to call the desk….
Sadly, in our brave new post-pandemic world, I run into this sort of thing way too often. The end result is that I check everything twice—and more often than not, I discover that I have been overcharged somewhere along the line.
You might want to ditch Direct TV altogether and just use a smart TV + streaming services of your choice + a good internet connection. Over the years, our family transitioned from Mediacom cable to Dish TV satellite (1 price for all the channels) to Dish TV (pick your own combo of small groups of channels) to a Roku smart TV + streaming services (freebies + Amazon Prime Video + only the paid channels we want, only during the months when they have shows we want to watch) + AT&T internet (unbundled from phone service when we switched from a landline to Ooma). If we lived close enough to local broadcast stations to get decent reception with an antenna, we’d go old-school by adding back an antenna, too — but we find enough sources of local news online that we don’t truly miss local news on TV.
AT&T did this to me several times. I used to have DSL with them and the switches and wires would go bad. First, I would stop getting signal when it rained, then other times. I would call them and they would tell me that they needed to come out and inspect MY equipment and phone lines first, for $149. I would say no, they needed to check theirs. I was told they couldn’t check theirs until they ruled out mine. Well, my ‘equipment’ was 1 string of CAT 5 from the box to the cable modem. I replaced that myself (wasting 50′ of perfectly good CAT 5). When I called them back and they blathered on about the $149 charge, I told them that I had strung new wire that morning. The guy said ‘really?. He said “I’m not supposed to do this, but…you’re right, we have a bad switch….I will just bypass it.” At that point, the lights on my modem stopped flashing and I had signal. This happened twice more as switch after switch died. Finally, they refused to forgo the $149 shakedown and I cancelled my service. These are just shakedowns.
This sounds an awful lot like airlines, which are now nickel-and-diming flyers to death with lots of charges for things that used to be included with the ticket. The difference is that the airlines don’t reverse the fees if you question them: you pay up or you hitchhike to you desitnation.
So yeah, it feels more like communication companies just assess charges as a trial balloon and if you squawk about it, they back down. Otherwise, it’s easy money from your pocket to theirs.
But I think this kind of thing is everywhere. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve run things through the grocery-story cash register that price differently than what was listed on the shelf. On occasion, when the cashier has told us the “ring-up” price was correct, I’ve made them wait – sometimes with customers in line – while I go back to the item, snap a photo, then walk back to the cashier and show them the listed price. As they’re correcting the price, I tell the cashier that the store’s IT staff owes the customers behind me an apology for making them wait longer than necessary in these days of automation.
I think grocery stores are counting on people just not checking the prices of things as they’re rung up…it’s free money for the store, and if you catch it, they just reverse it and still make a profit. It’s becoming harder and harder to trust anyone.
Interesting. I always check my groceries receipts to make sure that I got the prices I was expecting — but I do it after I leave the register. I will almost always check my receipt before I leave the store, and if something is amiss I’ll head to the customer service desk.
My thoughts are that I am usually buying an item because it’s on sale — if it were not it’s is likely I wouldn’t buy it until it was on sale. So if that price turns out to be incorrect I’ll frequently ask for my money back. On the other hand, I do realize it’s not the clerk’s fault that the prices are wrong in the computer, so I don’t feel I should hold up the line. Also, at Food Lion the discounts aren’t applied until they hit the Total button (unless you’re in the self serve kiosk), so you don’t see the true price until the end.
On the third hand, your comment makes me wonder if that is deliberate policy, so you can’t see during checkout if you’re getting the correct price? Other stores apply all the discounts immediately on the screen. On the fourth hand, I put my loyalty card number in while they are scanning the items, so the discounts are not available from the start. Not that it matters even if they scan your card at the beginning.
Bottom line there is that it pays to check what you’ve been charged, however you do it, because there are enough errors that over time it makes a discernable difference.
Also, I should add that if they’ve forgotten to ring something up, I feel obliged to bring that to their attention as well. It gets me some funny looks at times, but how could I not?
Yes, it is a haggling game now. When I still had cable TV I got the promotional price for six months, then I had to call to threaten to cancel to get the discounted price again. Kept doing that until I finally canceled for real. It’s annoying.