Here’s how to cut your bill without having to cut the cord.
Can making a call still help lower your Comcast bill? / Photograph courtesy of Comcast
Once upon a time, when you felt your TV bill ballooning out of control, you’d call the cable company, threaten to quit, wrangle yourself a new deal, and repeat as needed. Now, in the age of cord-cutting, it seems as if the best discounts are to be found in à la carte deal-digging: Drop this service, pick up that one, add another, end of story. The days of playing hardball with Comcast are over.
Or are they? Streaming services can add up; they too can raise prices over time. So I wondered: Is a call to our hometown behemoth still worth trying before going rogue? After all, I like Comcast. Could years of loyalty be a bargaining chip? Can I cut our bill — which had crawled up to $312 a month (for a deluxe cable package, Internet, and security) — without having to cut the cord?
My husband called first. He’d done the math on just the cable: The YouTube TV app ($83 a month, with 4K technology) plus HBO ($17) and Peacock ($8) would get us everything we were getting with Xfinity and save us about $74 a month (so $888 a year). He told the agent on the line that he wanted to nix cable to save money. “Okay!” she said. And that was that. Done. Cord cut. In minutes. What? I said. Without any negotiation at all? “I don’t think they do that anymore?” he said.
Illustration by James Yates
Try two: I called — as a customer, mind you, not a reporter — quickly got another rep, and laid it all out for her. Oh, no, she assured me: She could help with that bill. We could get all the channels we watched, including HBO, and she could trim the total bill to $264 a month, via a promotion. That’s a savings of $48 a month ($576 a year). I hung up to mull: The YouTube option would still be $26 a month ($312 a year) cheaper. So I called again, got a third rep, and laid it out (again), and voilà! She offered upgraded Internet, plus the same security and cable package (and HBO), for a grand total of $247 a month, good for two years. Our YouTube option, after taxes, with no changes to Internet or security, would be about $240 a month.
In the end, cutting the cord to save $84 a year didn’t seem worth it. For now, anyway. So we stuck with Comcast. You might not. But you should call and haggle. It might just pay off.
>> Click here to return to How to Live Well (for Less) in Philadelphia
Published as “Can You Talk Your Comcast Bill Down?” in the October 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
Christine Speer Lejeune
Source link