The Haggler: Cellphone Minutes Were Prepaid, but the Grief Was Free

Michael Phillips of Dublin noted that a 1996 episode of “Seinfeld” touched on a nearly identical issue. In it, Jerry has been bumped from the lineup of Career Day speakers at his junior high school, and this dialogue ensues:

JERRY It was a mix-up, I’m sure.

KRAMER They’re trying to screw with your head.

JERRY Now, why would a junior high school want to screw with my head?

KRAMER Why does Radio Shack ask for your phone number when you buy batteries? I don’t know.

Enough Radio Shack. Let’s talk about a different mystery and a different company: TracFone, which is based in Miami and sells pay-as-you-go minutes on cellphones.

Q. We keep a TracFone in our car in case of emergencies, and take it with us on trips, so it gets very little use. We are planning a trip next month, and being down to less than 100 minutes, I went online to buy another year’s worth, which I’ve done before.

The TracFone “buy minutes” page has a list of options, and this time there was a pop-up window offering 450 minutes with a bonus of 60 minutes if you bought before Oct. 31. Great, I thought, that’s just about the amount of minutes I need for a year.

So I clicked on the offer, and shortly thereafter my TracFone rang with this message: “450 minutes, 90 days.” In other words, any unused portion of my newly acquired 450 minutes would vanish in 90 days. I took the bait and there was a switch.

I immediately sent an e-mail to TracFone, asking it to void the transaction, and was informed that the minutes were already added to my phone so there was nothing it could do. I called the service number in the e-mail, explained how I was fooled by the pop-up window and asked that the transaction be canceled.

“Impossible,” I was told.

Eventually, I was offered a 30-day extension for my minutes. That seems insufficient. Might the Haggler do better?

Peter Freedman

Portland, Ore.

A. Of the many legitimate companies that the Haggler has tried to reach — as opposed to sham operations that are hiding from customers and the law — none have been as elusive as TracFone. It has no media relations line, and all the phone numbers listed on its Web site, which are printed beside the company’s Miami address, seem to ring in lands far, far away.

“I am in Miami,” a TracFone rep said, in an accent that did not exactly suggest Florida.

Really?

“Yes. Any question you have about TracFone you can ask me.”

“But my question is for someone who can speak on behalf of the company, to a reporter,” the Haggler continued. “Can you connect me to someone in your Miami headquarters?”

“I’m in the Miami headquarters,” this rep said.

Uh-huh.

“Who is the governor of Florida?” the Haggler asked.

Long pause. “Do you have a question related to TracFone?” the rep asked.

“Can you name a baseball team in Florida?”

Longer pause.

“Fill in the blank,” the Haggler said. “Florida is the blank state.”

More silence.

“I’ve only been here a month,” the phone rep said.

This was a dead end.

So the Haggler asked a New York Times researcher, Lisa Schwartz, to locate a home phone number for TracFone’s president and chief executive, Frederick J. Pollak — something the Haggler was unable to do with his own meager number-rummaging skills. She delivered, and Mr. Pollak seemed very surprised and not very delighted to be speaking to the Haggler one recent afternoon, on what sounded like his cellphone. He promptly bounced the Haggler to Mark Mahan, the senior vice president for customer care. He sounded less surprised, though no more delighted. He bounced the Haggler to Maria Montenegro, another senior vice president.

Ms. Montenegro asked for a screen grab of the offer that Mr. Freedman had responded to. The Haggler sent it, then waited a few days as she investigated.

“I understand why he was confused,” she said, referring to Mr. Freedman in a conversation last week.

She then offered this not-very-convincing defense: that, historically, all of TracFone’s 450-minute special offers have come with a 90-day time limit. In other words, even if this offer didn’t say “these minutes vanish after 90 days,” a customer ought to know because, hey, that’s the tradition.

Or something like that.

Even Ms. Montenegro seemed underwhelmed by this argument, and after the Haggler briefly noted its absurdities, she segued to her main point: that the company, prompted by Mr. Freedman’s letter, had decided to change all of its pop-up windows so that the time limit on minutes was abundantly obvious.

Why wasn’t it abundantly obvious already?

“Good question,” she said. “I can’t answer that. I’m told we’ve been using this type of pop-up offer for four years.” She said Mr. Freedman was the first to complain about it.

A customer service rep, meanwhile, called Mr. Freedman and walked him through a set of steps to delete the minutes he’d bought courtesy of that special and get a refund. So why did a phone rep initially say that deleting minutes from a TracFone was impossible?

Maybe they were trying to screw with his head.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/your-money/cellphone-minutes-were-prepaid-but-the-grief-was-free.html?partner=rss&emc=rss