I certainly do now as well. When I was more naive, I said yes to letting someone come by to take a look at my statements and see if they could get a better deal.
They showed up with a credit card machine, and insisted that I had agreed to change services to them. I told them that either they were lying to me, or that the person that called me was lying to them, but in either case, I had no interest in doing any business with them.
They are pushy too, before when I tried to be polite, they would get very insistent about me digging out my statements so that they could get me a better deal.
Now I just hang up on them. Much, much better use of my time.
Yeah,I did do some shopping around a while back, and found that the “best” would save me around that, certainly less than $100 a month. And it wasn’t going to come with many of the features and customer support that my current provider gives.
I had the same person call me 4 times in one day, each time from a different number. They actually had the audacity to say, “I’m sorry, we seemed to get cut off in the middle of our conversation.” I said, “I’m not sorry, that was intentional.” and hung up. She still called back 2 more times. I really don’t get how they think they will make a sale after pissing me off like that.
Agreed, though they piss me off slightly less than the electric choice providers.
In 13 years of working at Blockbuster, I saw someone use a Diner’s Club card exactly once. And I knew to type “DC” instead of “DISC” (Discover Card) to ring him up properly, because I’d read the employee handbook or the POS manual or something.
One of my favorites was Time Warner Cable. They called at least once a month about wanting to do a ‘site survey’ and see if they could save me some money on my phone bill. Every single time they called I explained that I already used them for my phone service and asked them to stop calling. One day I told them that the next time they called, I WILL make an appointment and I’ll let someone come down and waste their time pitching their services to an already existing customer. About a month later they called, I made an appointment and the guy showed up, a bit annoyed, because he figured out something was wrong about 20 minutes before he got here. IIRC, that was the end of the calls from them.
Now I get regular emails from the ‘area manager’ that wants to talk to me to see if he can save me some money. I talked to him once. He came down, tried to sell me fiber (which would have tripled my bill, not saved me anything) and spent 20 minutes looking like he wanted to punch me. He was internally fuming when I shot him down in the first 2 minutes of the meeting. And apparently this is common. I mentioned to someone else what happened and as soon as I said ‘area manager’ the person said ‘did he get mad at you for wasting his time when you didn’t want fiber’…yup.
Another time, someone came back to my office and told me there were some sales people in the store to see me. I got out there, saw who it was, yelled at them, told them that I’ll call the police if they come back and stood in the parking lot leering at them until they left the property. I came back in to see people (employees) looking at me with disgust for how I treated them. At least until I explained it was the 4th time this month and second time this week I’ve told them I’m not interested and that was all after I nicely sat down with them for an hour, compared what I pay to their prices which showed I would be spending a ton more to get those supplies from them. But they just kept coming back over and over and over.
I had Diners Club as a client for a short time, over a decade ago. At that time, Diners had just been bought by Discover – the primary reason that Discover bought it was to get access to Diners’ international acceptance network (prior to that, Discover cardholders had limited ability to use their cards outside of the U.S.)
But, in North America, BMO is the exclusive franchisee for Diners Club in the U.S. and Canada; if one gets a Diners Club card in those markets, it’s actually a branded Mastercard.
All very weird and convoluted. My understanding is that, at one time (like, the 1950s and 1960s), Diners Club was pretty big in the U.S., though, like American Express at that time, it was primarily accepted at hotels, restaurants, etc., as it was positioned for businesspeople to use for charging business and travel expenses. Diners Club is apparently still somewhat popular in some other countries (where local banks license the name), but has faded into obscurity in the U.S.