comcast sucks harder

Just when you think Comcast’s suckage cannot get any harder…
As previously mentioned, Better Half and I have a contract with Comcast for cable internet and television. After doing the research, it would appear as though Comcast is our only option for both, with our sole other alternatives being DSL and bunny ears. As such, we did the obvious things necessary to cut back on a positively absurd monthly bill – our internet speed has been downgraded from 6Mbit down to 1Mbit down, and I just recently called to try and get our cable bill corrected.
“Corrected?” Indeed – the charges shown on our bill are $57.75, while the charges on their webpage for the same lineup we currently have (screencaptured to the right for posterity) show $55.75. So I called up the national phone line, spoke to one of their customer service representatives, and found out that Comcast went through a “rate adjustment” period last month. Inquiring as to what, exactly, that meant, the CSR explained that all of the rates in general have gone up across the board at Comcast, and that the webpage simply had not been updated to reflect this change.
Rather than ineffectively rant and rave at a CSR for their company’s atrocious business practices, I politely hung up, and made my notes for writing this post.
1. Advertising one price and charging a higher price is, by very definition, false advertising. I am certainly not a lawyer, so I have no way of immediately determining whether or not this kind of misleading advertising would be challengable in court, but I am not sure if Comcast wants to find out either. That, and it would not be worth the $2 I would save this month before they unscrewed their webpage (but a class-action lawsuit, on the other hand… after all, from the CSR’s comments, I was not the only customer to call and complain about price discrepancies).
2. Not updating your webpage a month after your company’s rates have changed is simply inexcusable. If they coded the webpage properly (which I have no way of verifying), all a technician needs to do is change one number in one database block, and the rest of the site’s page will automatically update with the new information. If they coded their site poorly, it might require a little more effort, but it is still their responsibility to accurately advertise the prices for their services – their inability to do so reflects very poorly on the company.
3. How hard would it really have been to simply authorize the $2 decrease on our bill this month in order to honor the advertised price for our service, with the warning that the price would be going up next month, in accodance with an impending website update? Sure, you might lose a few thousand dollars, but you also keep your customers happy, and, after all, the mispublicized price is Comcast’s fault.
The end result of all this nonsense? We are paying a higher-than-advertised price, Comcast cotinues to prove that they could probably clean my carpets better than my Dyson, and two more thoroughly pissed-off customers. Unfortunately, we are stuck with Comcast or nothing for the time being, but once we live somewhere with a good view of the southern skies, something tells me we will be finding other alternatives for our time-wasting past-times…