Dear Virgin Mobile: Please stop being so retarded
I am not what you’d call a hard-core cellphone user. Currently I am 18 days into my cellphone month, and I have used nine minutes. Nine. This is why I use a pay-as-you-go provider, Virgin Mobile. I pay $14.99/month for 100 minutes, which is clearly about 5x the minutes I require. I pay an extra $5/month for interwebs access, so I can check my email and twitter and look stuff up when I need to. I use more text messaging than I do voice minutes, I just counted up that I have sent/received about 120 texts in the last 30 days. Still not a lot. I pay for my text as I go too, just adding money to my Virgin account, and they deduct 5¢ per text message sent/received, 25¢ per photo sent/received. On average over the last year I’ve spent $26/month on my cell phone, and I think that factors in the $100 I paid for the actual phone. Cheap, meets my needs, it’s all good – right?
No, of course it’s not. I get a message yesterday from Virgin that they’re upping the price of texts from 10¢ to 15¢ as of February 15th. “Wait!” you say, because you’ve been paying close attention, “I thought you said you only pay 5¢ per text?” Very perceptive of you to notice. The whole thing is confusing me too. I went to their site to figure out what texts are costing me now versus what they will cost under the new plan. I tend to believe the things my service providers tell me, so I naively calculated at the 10¢ vs 15¢ rates:
120 messages/month @ 10¢ per message = $12.00
120 messages/month @ 15¢ per message = $18.00
They offer a 200-message pack for $5/month, which would clearly be an advantage to me.
So I was ready to sign up for that. But then I started trying to sign up for it, and looking closer at my current account, and here’s what I saw on the “add a text message plan” screen:
Wait, so why are they saying my texts are going from 10¢ to 15¢ and then saying that pay-as-you-go text is currently 5¢? I went to check what I was actually paying now. Here’s a shot of my account with a bunch of texts to Twitter on it:
So clearly I am only paying 5¢ per text right now. That means adding a messaging pack might not be such a benefit to me, because 120 messages/month @ 5¢ per message only = $6.00. And I think last month was extra busy because I was out a lot for the holidays and texting locations back and forth. So I probably don’t even send/receive 120 texts most months.
Interestingly enough, further up on that page, above the account information showing I am paying 5¢ per text, the the section where I can add messaging packs belies what lies below:
Whatever the fuck, Virgin Mobile.
So they say they’re going to charge me 10¢ and they only charge me 5¢. That’s nice of them. But what’s going to happen on February 15th? Am I going from 5¢ to 15¢?Really? They’re tripling my rate? Not so nice of them.
Do these people even know what they’re charging me, or what they’re supposed to be charging me? I have been a customer of theirs for maybe 4 years or so, so perhaps I am grandfathered in at a cheaper text rate? But if that’s the case then don’t they know that before they contact me? I think I am going to just wait and see what happens on the 15th of February.
I know that compared to most people I pay almost nothing in cellphone bills. I know because I have been looking at iPhones and Blackberries recently, and am staggered at what they cost per month. I mean, I like tech candy as much as the next chick, but as tempting as an iPhone is, I really don’t need one. I can’t imagine myself ponying up $80/month in access fees just so I can fiddle with it when I am out to dinner or at the bar or something. If I was a hardcore cell phone user, or needed it at work, maybe.
Regardless – Virgin Mobile needs to get their act together and get their website in order. I hate shit like this, these huge websites with complicated architecture and tons of bells and whistles, when it’s all totally useless because the information contained on it is inaccurate and worthless. Tiresome.
Filed under: marketing mayhem | Comments (3)3 Responses to “Dear Virgin Mobile: Please stop being so retarded”
Leave a Reply
1) Right now they’ve got the paying public by the short and curlies.
2) Future legislation will stop that, make them play fair(er) and put a dent in their profits.
Hence, they are making hay while the sun shines, or to put it bluntly making as much cash as they can while they can.
I’m with a company called 3, because although I dislike them and their lack of service and often lack of signal, when I went to look at other providers it was going to cost me a lot more.
Blackberries over here are WAY overpriced, so definite no-no for me.
iPhones are WAY overpriced, available on only one network and feature locked – so you can’t use Bluetooth to send pictures etc to other people.
At the end of last year I got a Nokia E71 (because it was free with my phone contract) and it does everything I want and more – phone calls, text messaging, GPS, google maps, internet, email, dictionary, mini office thingy, camera, mp3 etc. Oh and I can connect to the wireless hub at home with it too. Doesn’t have the fame of the blackberry and iPhone, but definitely worth a look at prices in the US as an alternative.