Rogers Responds

March 10th, 2009 by Potato

I blogged earlier about Rogers’ 5% increase in fees this year, and how ridiculous that was especially in these economic times. I wrote them a letter about it (and in the meantime started playing around with an antenna to see if we could pull enough over-the-air stations to justify cancelling cable; unfortunately we couldn’t).

Here’s the text of the letter I sent:

Rogers Cable
855 York Mills Rd
Don Mills, Ontario, M3B 1Z1

To Whom It May Concern:

Today I received in the mail another letter from Rogers. I assumed it would be yet another piece of admail – what would have been the third this week – but opened it anyway. Instead, I found the attached notice that the price of my Rogers’ services would be going up again this year. $1.50/mo for basic cable, and $2.04/mo for internet; a 5.3% and 4.5% increase, respectively. That’s double the rate of inflation over the last few years, and five times the rate of inflation projected for this year. This is not a unique increase from Rogers: indeed, I have seen the cost of my services go up at this rate every year since I first signed up.

I am on a fixed income and I simply can’t afford to watch my services get more expensive every year like this. The change does not take place until March, which gives us a little over a month to find a solution. I sincerely hope to hear back from Rogers that this notice was sent in error and there will be no increase for 2009; if not, I’ll have to pick one of my services to downgrade or cancel outright.

A straightforward suggestion: Rogers currently sends me an enormous amount of admail (addressed and otherwise). I get, on average, 3 pieces just from Rogers every week; up to 15 ads every month. Even if the bulk admail rate with Canada Post is only 25 cents per item, Rogers could find the savings to more than make up for the proposed rate increase just by cutting out these mailings, and that’s not even including the marketing cost of designing or printing them! Believe me, Rogers is not an unknown name in this city; saturating homes with ads (especially homes that are all ready Rogers customers) will not bring the kind of subscriptions that stopping the ever-increasing price spiral will.

I look forward to hearing from you soon;

–Potato

PS: Most of those aforementioned ads are for Rogers Home Phone. My regular rate with Bell is $18.48/mo for home phone, and while they’ve fiddled with their long distance rates several times in the last decade, that base price has not increased once. Your $19.99/mo promotional offer does not impress me, no matter how many times a week it comes in the mail.

Surprisingly, they actually called me today. They’ve put a credit on my account to counter-act the price increase, but only for 3 months. Still, that’s better than nothing. They’ve also stopped the addressed admail. I tried to tell the guy that my point about the admail was not that it was annoying me specifically, but that it looked like Rogers had a problem somewhere along the chain of their marketing department and they were basically wasting money (and wasting money on one hand while demanding more from me didn’t make me a happy customer). I had to leave to get to work and the guy had a bit of an attitude like he was doing me a huge favour, so I just thanked him for the discount and let it rest at that. But for the most part I’m just astounded I got a call back: this is not the first complaint letter I’ve sent Rogers (and not the first one about price hikes), but this is the first response I’ve ever gotten (though I did get a more substantial discount when I called to cancel my Extreme service back when that went from a $2 premium over express to $10). I’m sure they’ll go away in May when my bill goes up $3.54+tx, but for now Rogers has actually managed to inspire the warm n’ fuzzies by having the courtesy to acknowledge my complaint (ok, maybe not “warm n’ fuzzies”, but definitely the this-is-not-a-faceless-corporation-out-to-swallow-my-soulzies).

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2 Responses to “Rogers Responds”

  1. Wayfare Says:

    Excellent use of the word “soulzies”.

  2. moneygardener Says:

    Good for you for doing this. I thought the same thing when I noticed the increase but i didn’t have the inclination to write a letter. This is why my wife is a Rogers shareholder. They squeeze you and you are usually too lazy to notice or do anything about it.