Last Updated on: 5th March 2020, 12:29 pm
I don’t know how many of you have gotten or will get this, but I want to mention it because I hate to see people taken advantage of.
Lately Rogers has been texting us, offering up a new iPhone 8 for $0. My current 6S is showing it’s age and sooner or later Carin is going to need a new one too, so we thought we or at least I would take them up on it.
But as it turns out, the new phone is anything but free.
When we called in, we were told that yes, we could get a $0 iPhone 8, but that the price of our current plan would be going up by $60 before tax.
Um…wait…what? That’s a not insignificant amount. What are we getting for this $60 plus tax?
One gig of data added to our current Share Everything plan, we were told.
We followed that up with the obvious question, which of course is and?
Silence.
So let me see if I’ve got this right. In order to get my free iPhone, I have to pay $60 more per month and get basically nothing in return? That sounds like a ripoff.
The rep on the phone seemed surprised that we had thought this through so quickly, but wanting to make a sale, told us that if we wanted to keep our current rates we could buy a phone for $429.
Thinking things through quickly again, I decided yeah, let’s do that, because a little quick math tells me that my free phone with its attached strings would cost $1440 over the length of the two year contract, or to put it another way, somewhere around 3 and a half $429 iPhones.
To their credit, nobody we dealt with at Rogers outright lied to our faces, but that’s some pretty egregious deception by omission that they were hoping we wouldn’t notice. And this isn’t me trying to talk up myself or Carin as super smart or anything, but they’re right to think that most people wouldn’t have. There’s a reason why almost nobody in my family will go to a phone store without at least asking me first. These companies (Rogers is far from alone here) make this stuff confusing on purpose. They do it because it works and because there aren’t any rules (at least not any with teeth) against it.
If you get a similar offer, by all means check into it. But be careful. That old saying about things sounding too good to be true because they usually are exists for a reason.