I haven’t posted in years and it took me several tries to remember my password from two years ago but I was so upset about the current “convenience fee” imposed by Verizon that I decided to resurrect my blog to propose a National Leave Verizon Wireless Day.
Some background: Verizon has announced a $2 “convenience” fee for paying your bill online or via phone with your credit card (you can still avoid this fee by using auto-pay). This smacks of corporate greed and gouging of customers who have no choice but to pay this fee. One that makes no sense what so ever since it’s more convenient (and cheaper) for Verizon to process online payment than check or cash payments (even with the fees credit card networks impose on them). Having personal experience with Verizon (FIOS) autopay consistently failing (they’ve shut off my parent’s cable/internet/phone 4 times over the last year because their system failed to autopay without ever notifying them that it has), having autopay enabled is no solution.
Of course to Verizon, autopay means you never look at your bill and thus are less likely to notice mistakes and “fees” which they tack on. This happens more often than you think. For example, my fiance returned one of her cable boxes to Verizon and was still being charged for 3 months. If she was autopaying, she might have never noticed.
This type of customer abuse is reason enough to have a leave Verizon Wireless day.
So how do you leave Verizon without incurring the dreaded early termination fee? Well along with this new $2 fee they’ve added they’ve also increased their “Administrative Charge” by 16 cents. This charge, in my non-legal, opinion is a material change (if you signed your contract prior to Sept 2011) and would justify your termination of the contract. I would “terminate” the contract by porting your number out to Google voice, a different carrier or a pay as you go plan and then calling Verizon and notifying them that you did this per your contract. Careful though if you bought your phone through a third party like Wirefly as they charge their own early terminationn fee on top of Verizon’s.
