So our old LG flip phones were starting to get a bit worn out and we just got our “New Every Two” (thanks for the catchy slogan marketroids!!!) $100 off discount so a few weeks ago I figured I would go to the store and go through the upgrade hassle.
When I got there though I didn’t like any of the phones they were offering and the RAZR was still at $200. So I left and figured I’d wait for a while. In the meantime I got a couple of discount offers in the mail from them but only if I called and ordered over the phone apparently.
Well after attempting to compare the pricing and gotchas between the store, phone, and online sales systems I came to the conclusion that Verizon Wireless does not want you to have any clue how to get the best deal. (What a shock.)
In the end, it looks like you can potentially save the most money by ordering online because instead of offering shitty mail-in-rebates they offer an instant web rebate.
But there were several things that I found extremely confusing about the web ordering process that I don’t feel like I got very satisfactory answers for. First of all, you can only upgrade one phone at a time. This upgrade requires you to renew your contract for two years. But since you can’t do both phones on your plan at once, it seemed at least somewhat possible that the contract term was compounded. Meaning that the first upgrade would extend my contract by two years and the second would do the same for a grand total of a four year contract period.
This doesn’t seem likely and the online chat person (who, amazingly didn’t seem to be from India) claimed that it was two years per phone not compounded.
But the online chat person also said that I’d probably have to upgrade my plan when I asked about that. My current plan ends up being $60 per month without taxes, and the new plans they’re foisting off are at least $70 without taxes.
So when I actually started the online upgrade process there was absolutely nothing about changing the contract. So then I called their customer service number hoping to find out if I was going to be forced to upgrade my plan somehow. The guy I talked to claimed that I could keep the same plan.
So I went ahead and did it but I’m a bit nervous. If it works I’ll get two RAZR phones for a total of $100 with no increase in my monthly bill.
So my questions are these:
Has anybody used the online phone upgrade service from Verizon?
Did they change your plan to something else without you getting to choose it?
Were there any other gotchas?