I guess enough folks are not exercising their brain sufficiently so that companies can pull off questionable business practices that could be avoided by a little thought.
Recently our DirecTV signal disappeared. I went through the troubleshooting procedures and didn’t fix the problem so I called DirecTV and asked for a service person to be sent out. The operator informed me that the service call would cost $79, but, if I signed up for their service plan the call would only be $19.95. After a little verbal dance, I found out that this was contingent on paying an additional fee of $6 per month.
The numbers don’t make sense. Even if you keep your plan for only one year, if you have one service call during that time it will cost you $92. In our case, we have had our receiver for over 4 years and had only one problem that was not fixable by me. Say I had bought this service plan from them 4 years ago, my service call would have cost me the $20 plus $288 in monthly fees for a total of $308 .
Buyer beware, and take some care first to think about that “good” deal.
