In a few hours, I’ll likely receive an EMAIL from AT&T where they’ll finally own up to how much money they want for their mostly adequate cellular service.
Like clockwork, it appears 48 hours before they make their grab for the cash even though the bill date when it was actually processed is a week ago on the 23rd of the month.
This is often the first time I have any idea how much the darned bill is going to be and then it’s often a matter of trying to figure out how in the hell I’m going to magically going to hand over the monthly king’s ransom they demand in the two days they graciously allow me (most of the time).
Most months this isn’t a problem as the bill is usually fairly consistent from month to month so I at least have a reasonable idea of what to expect. It doesn’t make the ensuing moments of heart-stopping panic until I remember the financial lay of the land and hopefully once more manage to stay one step ahead of the bills.
It’s not an easy thing at the best of times and when the economy is in the toilet due to completely unforced errors by the imbeciles running what passes for our “government”, it’s just that much harder in a time where petrol is up $1.40 per gallon (or more!) which has a knock-on effect on the prices for just about everything else in the roughly two months since the shooting started in Iran.
So a lot of the price increases we’re seeing in groceries and other essentials of daily life are kind of understandable. It sucks and there’s more than a little greed and price gouging that’s not hard to find if you look for it (and the Attorneys General in the various states really ought to be!) but you can at least ascribe a reasonable economic explanation for them.
Which brings me to the nasty surprise that was lurking in my AT&T bill early this morning after writing up the latest set of tracks I spun at the beer league hockey games of AT&T reaching their hand into my wallet and helping themselves to another $30 per month.
How nice of them.
The official blurb on their justification for them getting even more piggy on my wallet certainly rates very high on the “you’ve got to be f***ing kidding me!” scale:
The monthly plan charge for smartphones on select, retired unlimited plans with AT&T Unlimited Your Way® is increasing by $5 per line. This change helps us continue providing reliable network service, quality products, and great customer experiences.
I’d rate the service mostly reliable when they’re not bricking their routers with ill-advised updates, “quality products” is questionable given their sky-high pricing on both phones and plans, and “great customer experiences” is over-the-top marketing hyperbole that has absolutely no basis in reality as far as I’ve seen.
The greatest customer experiences I’ve had with AT&T is when I don’t actually have to engage with their imbeciles manning the stores or the offshored “customer service agents” who are little more than severely exploited and underpaid chat-bots in human form working for slave wages and no benefits that rarely can do much more than whatever their policy script dictates.
Not that their customer service was so hot even when you had a better than average chance of getting someone based in the United States when it often took escalating even the most mundane issues one or two levels to finally find someone capable of dealing with it.
As part of this, you’ll get an extra 10GB of hotspot data per month. Starting in April 2026, wireless lines active prior to July 24, 2025 will see the relevant price change reflected on your bill.
And what’s truly impressive is this “perk” of an additional 10GB of hotspot data per month even though I don’t use the allotment of hotspot data I already have because I do not and never will trust Wi-Fi networks and routers in rando businesses where the first point of management is the business itself (who are often clueless technologically) and often the performance is far worse than just hitting the cellular towers directly due to the inadequate hardware on premises to handle the demand.
Frankly, they can keep the “extra 10GB” and give me a perk that’s actually worth having.
You know, like back when you could get a huge discount on ad-free HBO Max which is why I have the plan they’re wanting to kill off or something else equally useful since HBO Max and Disney+ went into the bin here at The Nerdery thanks to the squeeze of the economy.
I’d even be thrilled to have an option to have an additional discount and none of the “perks” which wouldn’t be all that hard to implement and would probably be popular as hell like cash back on the credit card.
Two things that the average phone company stuffed with dinosaurs and ancient technology and executives who really could care less about the customer past what they can shake them down for on a monthly basis will never understand much less make a priority.
In fairness, I can’t say that they did it without so much as a “by your leave”.
Federal law requires that they give notice of their increasingly frequent price increases (but sadly with no requirement for real transparency as to the justification for said price increases) and indeed they did so in the March bill.
But like so many plots that are so evil and devious that they cannot stand the light of day and anything close to true transparency, it’s hard to see what passes for their disclosure of the price increase as being anything close to a proper notice and much closer to the textbook definition of “deceptive and unfair trade practices”.
The first and *ONLY* mention of the price increase is in a small blurb in fairly a fairly small font (and even the headline above it even though it was in bold might have actually mentioned that the rate was going to change/increase) and that halfway down page *7* of *8*.
You would think that an impending price increase that is unlikely to go over well when the cat’s finally out of the bag would rate a much more prominent placement in the part of the bill where most consumers actually are looking which is most often how much money do they have to wave a magic wand to fork over to their AT&T masters.
But…no.
It’s literally buried in the bottom of the bill where even people who read the bill religiously every month could hardly be blamed for missing something AT&T really went out of their way to not call attention to which combined with their silly press release and supposed benefits of being ripped off an extra $5 per month per line really beggars belief as to how this is not yet another greedy cash grab by a greedy corporation that learnt all the wrong lessons from the cable companies they’ve been hanging around with these past few years.
There was no other warning that this increase was coming.
Normally one gets an EMAIL when a rate increase is foisted upon them but nope, not this time. You’d think the EMAIL where they announce the final number of the month’s bill with that super generous 48 hours to pay it would be a reasonable place to give a heads up that a price increase is coming in the following month and give some indication of what (if anything) can be done about it but nope, nothing there either!
They probably put out a press release but big media seems to be all in on ignoring malfeasance in the political and business sectors so who knows how much on-air play this increase got.
I have no idea because I was priced out of actually being able to afford having big media in this house so unless I just happen to stumble upon it quite by accident, usually the first notice I’m going to get is in the bill when it’s already too late to do anything about it.
It would be one thing if they could truly justify the increase other than in terms of what I already supposedly have, what they’ve never offered, and what I’ve never truly experienced in the near 30 years I’ve been through the several incarnations that is the modern AT&T starting at “Bellsouth Mobility DCS” respectively and then offering a supposed upgrade of hotspot data that is of no use whatsoever.
I’m surprised their official statement didn’t blame it on the idiotic tariff regime of the current administration which provided a very convenient bogeyman and cover for corporations to extract all sorts of greed-based profit windfalls.
Given how much networking kit and phones they buy and import from China alone, I could even understand that.
I wouldn’t *LIKE* it but then I thought the tariffs were an utter load of bollocks which even the *CONSERVATIVE* justices on the Supreme Court that have made a consistent habit of crowning King Donald I and giving him everything he wants and none of the accountability he truly deserves agreed was a full rogering of the Constitution too far and declared them unconstitutional.
Not that the decision has done the actual victims of the tariff regime any good…you know, the taxpayers and consumers actually paying the tariffs that were passed through by the corporations who are now lining up like the pigs at the trough waiting for refunds of the tariffs they paid and passed along to be refunded from the government at taxpayer expense.
So not only do the consumers take it in the shorts in the form of higher taxes and prices all round (because you know neither of those are going down anywhere near as quickly as they were increased…not with shareholders these corporations actually care about raking in the big buck$), they don’t get any relief from the decision for the direct harm to their budgets caused by the illegal tariffs.
Sadly, I expect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which has been effectively neutered nor the Federal Trade Commission won’t do anything about yet another corporate cash grab with the absolute bare minimum of “notice” and no real power to defend oneself from exploitation by the Big Communications sector which are mostly in lock-step with each other that they laughingly call “competition”.
It’s not “competition” if there are three huge players who own pretty much everyone else and what one does, the others tend to follow in short order.
Unless your idea of “competition” is seeing which one can race to the absolute bottom in terms of customer service, that is.
So looking to our government who is supposed to be looking out for those of us who don’t have the power to do so ourselves is a complete waste of time.
AT&T clearly knows that the consumers are left to their own wits to try to salvage anything positive from the situation and from the tone of that last sentence, it’s clear that not only do they not give a tinker’s cuss about the consumer, they tacitly are acknowledging that like George Carlin told us decades ago…we consumers have “owners” and they are amongst them and that even if you’re of a mind to cancel, they know full well that any “better deal” to be had elsewhere is fleeting at best until the next pit stop on the road to rock bottom customer service.
There’s not even an inkling of what options there might be to come to a more favourable deal. It’s either eat the increase or walk because I don’t have any confidence that the chat-bot I’m going to be making all these points to will have the power or the will to give a rat’s rear end about my views on this situation.
They’ve got all the numbers in house…how much I’m paying now versus how much less I could be paying if I switch to plan X or Y. It’d be lovely if there was a support tool to game out these scenarios and see what the real result of plan changes would be without dealing with the annoying customer service imbeciles but they don’t have the incentive to provide that.
That tool exists on their end because otherwise how would the chat-bots know to report out the results (after being pushed a few times) in order to prevent the cancellation they seem to accept as inevitable knowing that there’s probably an equal number of consumers pissed off at their current phone company that it ends up being a wash?
They’re perfectly happy screwing the consumer for all they can get away with and doing the very least they can along the way.
Their “notice” is certainly that…it may well meet the exceedingly low bar set by the CFPB and FTC overseen by political appointees who have no interest in faithfully executing the missions of those agencies when they were authorised by Congress but it still comes off as “deceptive and unfair trade practices” that are already illegal under the law but rarely see the prosecution it so richly deserves.
This is what our political “leaders” call “capitalism” and “competition” when the oligarchy is paying them to look the other way.
Yay…for once again being an exploited consumer. 🙁