I like Dish but they keep raising the price by adding stations I don't care about.

that here, we have multiple companies to choose from. If one is too high, you can usually find one that will beat it just to get your service. We did this with WOW and Time Warner. They both offered pretty much the same channels, but we were able to get the bill down $30 by telling Time Warner that we had WOW. They were more than happy to oblige. I know there are a lot of smaller towns though, like where I grew up, that only have one or two companies and the prices don't go down.

for tv..cable and satillite.
Playing them off each other had been effective, as has playing the land line phone off against cell service.

Eventually, tho, we just cut the cord and have no tv.

Much easier to negotiate rates in urban areas, as you say.

But I went in last week and told them to turn off all movie channels,Jesus channels and shopping channels and that I was tired of paying $260 a month.I knew they could only turn off the movie channels without me losing blocks of other channels,but it sounded good at the time.
My bill is $190 now and didn't have to give up anything.I have phone,computer connection and every channel that they offer.

We only pay $100 a month for all three services. You guys are getting screwed, bad. Makes me thankful for the choices here.

out unless the caller mentioned one of the competing providers and their offers specifically. It wasn't enough that they'd threaten to "take their business elsewhere" they had to say "I'm going to (competing company) where I can get service for $xx".

I've since started mentioning the competition in all my dealings with call centers and have sometimes negotiated some great deals out of it.

that you have to use competitor's name to get deals.
Fortunately, that is pretty east, since there are so many ads out ever week for deals.

about cutting costs. I have a bundled plan.

than TW & Direct. Really have not had reception problems but their customer service reps know zilch. At every renewal year they couldn't tell what the end date was. The creeping increases per year were the irritant, which happens with everything I guess.

When I told a TW sales rep that all cable customers complain about the creeping increases he told me a "secret&quot ?), that they sign customers up with an "introductory promotion" price and the customers assume this will be the price forever, but it is a fraction of what the true value is and therefore the prices go up every year until the full true value price is reached.

This year, when the full year was paid for, Dish started billing monthly for two bucks, which they said was some kind of new fee or surcharge, then they claimed they have terminated the yearly payment plan, shifted what I paid into an account they will bill monthly, whatever. I forget about it all year then at renewal time it's too much hassle to switch. And yes there are all those hundreds of channels I have no use for, besides having to take a higher block of channels just to get one.

Several months ago I saw an article on the owner of Dish, who had an image of being folksy and friendly, and he turns out to be an Ahhhnuld hungry/hustler type, literally from Austria, and a despot with employees, held fundraisers for Dem candidates then voted Rethug or something like that.

1. therefore the prices go up every year until the full true value price is reached.

Not just Dish....phone company here does that too. I suspect it is wide-spread practive.


2. Dish started billing monthly for two bucks, which they said was some kind of new fee or surcharge,

AT&T Mobile started charging an extra 61 cents, calling it an administrative fee, and Frontier, which carries phone/dsl service here, did the same, right after the phone companies annouced our state has stopped regulating them.

I did a spreadsheet of our phone/dsl bill, using the line item charges, to compare every month.
All those Federal.state and local items and etc. varied in cost every month, plus there was an occasional unexplained term used for under a $, which came and went.
But the overall bill increased every month from the negotiated rate to the full price eventually, as you say.

Still, land line and unlimited DSL for under 70.00 per month is a good deal around here.