I was talking to a person who was still renting his cable modem from his service provider here he paid about $5/month for it. Apparently he has been doing it for years too. That then got me curious as to why he didn’t just outright buy it in the beginning as you could pretty much recoup the cost after a year or so. He mentioned that the modem would have cost about $120 if he decided to buy it which seemed steep.

I was then looking at the modem model and not surprisingly the exact same one could be obtained for about half the price at various retail stores. This holds true many times where if a service provider requires you to have an item to utilize the service it can often be cheaper to simply buy it from a third party source. It’s just that a lot of people would rather not go through the trouble in trying to locate it.

Even something as simple as entering the exact item you are looking for on a search engine can steer you the right way in finding a good deal.

Today I was reading how a lineup of certain products from a company were getting a price cut of about 40%. This is pretty substantial considering the products normally ranged about $600+. What I noticed is that not every store had the new prices in affect. However, for the ones that did I noticed that they advertised the price drop as just a crazy sale that you should take advantage of now. Of course, this gets a lot of people to purchase stuff on the spot.

At times like this is usually why whenever I see something that is drastically lower cost wise I always try to research whether it is a result of a universal price drop. Because obviously the deal isn’t as great as you think it may be and you can probably hold out for an even better deal for when it truly goes on sale.

This was kind of interesting. There was a scenario where a person is moving into another household where everyone will sign up under one big package to save money. Imagine say five people getting a phone line each from a bundle as opposed to each person signing up for their own packages which would be more expensive.

The roadblock was that the person was interested in keeping their old number when they move. When they inquired about this from the provider they said that it wasn’t possible as they would have to just transfer the account to the new address. Hence, the person would have to be billed separately with their own package.

To me this made no sense as I was thinking you could technically signup with a different provider who would allow you to keep your old number at the new address. Then if you really want to go back to the old provider you can just ask that this number be taken from the competitor as you resign up with them. Sure enough, you could do it this way which made them wonder why they couldn’t just avoid the hassle in the first place and just directly port the number over.

It looked like it was simply one of those situations where the person working at the customer service just got a little lazy. Kind of interesting that you need to give people examples like these at times to make them realize that what you are requesting shouldn’t have to cost you more money or that it is impossible otherwise.

Just the other day I e-mailed a person about a course that he was offering as it sounded interesting to me. I did read his ad which got me curious in wanting to learn more such as the price and how everything works. Many times I do this too as usually the way that they respond to you will tell you a lot such as if they value your business by being attentive to your questions.

In this case it was so strange as the response was mostly just replying with the cost of the course and then re-writing exactly what was said in the sales ad. To me that just showed that they didn’t really care too much if I became a customer or not as maybe they get too many requests. Therefore, I thought that would be the same attitude if I actually did try the course and so I decided to not inquire about it any further.

I was just thinking too that in situations like these a personalized response can go such a long way in acquiring customers. Even if you are copying your response off of a pre-written literature, adjusting it to make it seem like you are actually talking to the person as opposed to say simply throwing them a brochure does a lot to instill confidence in what you offer.

So after trying to activate that new card I got yesterday it seems like there is an issue in trying to access the online services. For the most part this is primarily a bank where you need to handle your finances online as they don’t exactly have many physical locations. Those are more for soliciting and signing up new customers.

The process to get assistance is a little repetitive as you pretty much have to phone a hotline of sort where you are asked like a hundred questions by a machine to try and fix your account. It probably saves the business a lot of money where the overhead in running the operation is so much lower compared to others. Would be so much easier to just walk in an actual bank in cases like this though and deal with a real person.