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Verizon Charged Marine's Widow an Early Termination Fee
In a decision that was reversed as soon as someone with half a brain in their PR department learned about it, Verizon charged a widow a $350 early termination fee. After the death of her marine husband, Michaela Brummund decided to move back to her home town to be with her family. Verizon doesn't offer any coverage in the small town so Michaela tried to cancel her contract, only to be hit with an early termination fee. From the article: "'I called them to cancel. I told them the situation with my husband. I even said I would provide a death certificate,' Michaela said."
Why would a corporation care about a grieving widow, unless there was some sort of bad publicity to arise out of... oh dear.
doesn't exempt you from all commitments. I feel bad for her that she lost her husband but a contract is an obligation. There's a reason we have life insurance policies, you know, so you can pay some bills after your spouse dies.
This is why its bad to give zero authority to the peons at the bottom of your organization. In an effort to restrict decisions to higher-ups and make low-level decisions 95% predictable, you get bit in the ass with bad PR that can cost millions in damages, only because the first two or three people closest to the customer aren't allowed to make braindead obvious decisions.
You can almost always tell a corporate culture by calling their customer support.
Talk about playing the sympathy card.
Now, I'm sure Verizon should have been more flexible here, but not because she was a widow. Because the early termination fee is unfair in this circumstance. Do others get to be treated unfairly because they haven't had a bereavement?
Actually it does.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"She should have predicted this when she signed up for Verizon"
--
BMO
So, in the U.S. military members (and their families apparently) are actually exempted from contract law? Intriguing....
The issue isn't that the guy died and the widow wanted to cancel the contract. If that were so, I'd totally be with her.
It's that she decided to up and move and canceled the contract because where she decided to move didn't have service. That, is her fault only.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Yeah man, this is America. Pay up.
No, no, I don't care if your husband just died defending my freedom, and the loss of his income changed your lifestyle. Hell, I don't care if you're homeless and struggling to make ends meet. I don't give a shit if the taxes you or your parents paid in 10 years ago helped fund the infrastructure that enabled me to make this money in the first place.
This is America. I am a corporation with infinite rights. You're just a speck on my quarterly report.
Pay up.
So he died. Get over it.
Congratulations! That's about the most insensitive thing you could say to a grieving widow. From TFA:
Michaela's father, a veteran himself, is outraged. "It's not about the money. I don't care about the money. It's the principle. The man was overseas fighting for our country and lost his life doing so," said Kevin Gause. "It's heartless what Verizon is doing."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Early termination fees are simply part of the way service providers effectively finance equipment purchases at above market prices and at exorbitant rates of interest, while hiding that fact from the user as much as possible.
Someone made an observation last week that I thought was especially telling (wish I could credit the source). I'm basically paraphrasing here ..
I get through the 2 year contract which pays for the phone. So how come my rates don't go down in the third year if I keep the same phone?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You're being overly sensitive - that 'non-denominationally pious' turn of phrase has been part of the politically correct vocabulary of every public official, PR and HR hack for the last few generations.
I'm sure it's a copy & paste from other previous public statements - I'd be surprised if it wasn't from some document template they've been using anytime anyone dies and they need to express condolences.
Can I get a smart phone (iPhone or an Android phone) that's prepaid in the US? I don't think that's currently possible. There's a lot about our cellphone industry that needs to change, from text message rates and the absurd markup on wireless data plans, to predatory contracts and schemes to hide their price gouging on handsets. Unfortunately, they have the money, which means we'll never get sane regulation of this industry which has proven that it is incapable of acting fairly and honestly. Just another example of a market outcome that benefits a few people at the top of a huge corporation, while leaving the rest of us with no viable option for something that is effectively a requirement to get by these days.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
First of all, she shouldn't need a fucking dime. Why are we paying $300,000 for a Blackwater mercenary and paying every real soldier a tenth of that? Why aren't we providing end of life payouts to widowed military wives? If we can't do that for people who have literally died for the country, what chance does anyone have? This is like when McCain fought education benefits for veterans. It's appalling, regardless of what I think about the true purpose of the war.
We have literally got to the point in this country where even the immediate families of dead soldiers are treated like shit if they haven't got money. Visa and Verizon are raking in record profits, and the could afford to forgive debts to dead soldiers if they wanted to. But it's far more important to bonus their board of directors for continuing to shit on the population at large.
There's a reason why their customer satisfaction has gotten lower than even the kings of shit customer service - the airlines.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
So, should everyone whose spouse dies be let out of such contract, or only the spouses of Marines?
Maybe only those who died serving the public - firefighters, police, military, etc? What about private "military contractors"? They kinda do the same thing (you know, defend Freedom, Justice, and the American Way), just for more money.
Maybe only those who were married to someone who's nice?
I'm fine with it either way, really, I just need to know what the rules are.
sic transit gloria mundi
I think the issue here is the fact that she's having to pay the fee even though she's now living in an area with no service. This has nothing to do with the fact that she is a widow, this is just asshattery on VZW's part. I know certain other carriers allow you to cancel under similar circumstances without paying the ETF (AT&T).
She probably lived in base housing. When he died she was required to move.
Yes, verizon should be more reasonable in general, especially when the contract is being cancelled because they provide no coverage where it's needed.
The fact that they would be such bastards even to the widow of a veteran just demonstrates the extent of their inhumanity.
I had my sister on my T-Mobile account and she had purchased a new Android phone through the T-Mobile store. She died last year and it took me a few months to get around to calling T-Mobile to terminate the contract on her phone.
The T-Mobile customer service representative was very understanding and sympathetic and waived any disconnect penalties or outstanding balance on the phone purchase. She had even offered to see if she could backdate the service termination a few months. I told her that was not necessary as it was my own reticence to close the account (you know, the finality of death and wrapping up the details of someone's life).
Over the years little experiences like that with T-Mobile have made me a very loyal customer. It seems that someone still remembers how to treat their customers.
Tisha Hayes
I honestly have no problem with Verizon charging the termination fee in this situation. She canceled and that's all that matters. Whenever a spouse dies there's extra expenses, and this is just one of them. Life sucks. Death sucks even more.
She lost her husband, who was a marine, and probably served his country in some respect during one of their pointless overseas "conquests" (if you can call soldiers dying and spending trillions of dollars for 10 years without achieving fuck all a "conquest"). Yes, very sad.
But just because her husband died does not magically make her debts and responsibilities go away.
How can you blame the service provider for sending a demand letter at a possibly "stressful" time for her ? What should they do during the billing cycle ? Hold every damn bill until they've verified no immediate relative has recently died ?
So how long after a spouse dies is the surviving spouse exempt from service fees for their own services?
I realize that's a rhetorical question, but let's see...
"The remote detonated IED, one of those went off, and he took full force," explained Michaela surrounded by pictures of her husband and flowers, still fresh, from his recent funeral. "He died on the chopper on the way to the field hospital."
I'm going to say, longer than that.
I suppose it's technically possible that this is being spun, since she's not specifically talking about the termination fee here, and it doesn't say how long ago he died. Then again...
The reason that she is canceling is NOT because her husband died. It is because she is moving. That part is a choice.
She is moving because her husband died. Sure, she could choose to stay, but it's not unreasonable.
But all of this is beside the point. I'm not saying that Verizon should have to do anything...
I know that when a death is involved, most companies are going to make exceptions to rules.
I realize it would be an exception. I might even concede that this particular case isn't necessarily clear. (For example: Whose fault is it that she went with a plan and a provider that charges $350 early-termination fees?)
But I was replying to an AC who said this:
So he died. Get over it.
That is not an OK thing to say. Not now, not in ten years. If it's tangential, it's tangential, but you do not tell a grieving widow to "get over it."
Or, to be more precise: It is allowed (freedom of speech), but incredibly insensitive.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I worked for Apple a while back in a call center. Customer service and stuff, answering questions about where people's iPod orders were, sorting out returns. Policy at the time was that any iPod with a personalised engraving on the back was non-returnable, NO EXCEPTIONS.
So I get a call from a man who wanted to return an iPod he had bought and personalised for his son as a birthday present. So I explained the policy, and asked why he wanted to return it as per S.O.P., and as it turns out - his son was dead. He had died the week before his birthday in a car accident.
I asked no more questions, cleared the return right then and there, and told him a courier would be by in the morning with a box to collect it. And his card would be refunded as soon as it reached the depot. My team leader didn't question my actions even for a second.
Bottom line here, yeah, he could have been lying. But one wrongly returned iPod vs the publicity fallout if I said no? Being an insensitive policy-following robot vs having some compassion? The whole point of having live humans on the front line is for customer relations, just for situations like this, and when I was at Apple they at least had a fucking clue about how to do it right - we had a lot of training and we were expected to make judgement calls on balancing the interests of the customer and the company.
This shit from Verizon? Bad. Customer. Service. And it's coming back to bite them in the ass - they're the phone company that slapped a grieving soldier's widow with a $350 fee because she wanted to move back home to be with her family. The damage control alone is going to cost a lot more than $350, and they could have avoided it all if their front line CSRs had the power and the judgement to waive the ETF if the situation merits it. Either someone made a bad call, or they just can't do it at all - and do you really want to deal with a company that doesn't trust its customer point-of-contact employees with the most basic ability to solve customer problems?
Oh for fucks sake, chill. It was some low paid drone in a call center who made the original decision. Not exactly an executive decision.
You can bet your life it was an executive decision to staff the call center with low-paid droids incapable of acting on moral discretion. This is the business model they choose to create, where 99% of their interaction with the public is through low-paid droids incapable of moral discretion.
On this model, getting publicly burned in effigy once every six months is a normal cost of business. The phone companies have taken it upon themselves to function as the bulwark of enculturated infantilism (few cost-up-front purchase options). They deserve what they get.
On the other side of the fence, America's enlisted men have roughly the same level of moral discretion when it comes to participating in the wrong war as Verizon's call center droids have in accepting a justifiable termination request.