There is an old chestnut about placing a frog in a kettle filled with room-temperature water. Beneath the kettle is a burner.
If you heat the kettle a little at a time, the frog won’t realize that the water is getting hotter. As a result, the frog will unwittingly remain in the kettle until the water reaches the boiling point, thereby killing it.
(Since this is the internet, please note: I do not recommend boiling frogs; nor were any amphibians harmed in the writing of this post. The above is merely a metaphor.)
After dabbling with dial-up Prodigy internet services for a few years, I enrolled with Time Warner Cable for broadband internet access in 2003. Time Warner Cable did an excellent job, providing quality service for a reasonable price.
Then in 2016, Spectrum Internet acquired Time Warner Cable. That was the point at which my frog was placed in the kettle filled with water.
Over the last nine years, Spectrum Internet has slowly turned up the temperature on the burner beneath that kettle—mostly in the form of arbitrary and unexplained price increases.
I was enrolled with Spectrum for 400 Mbps internet service—not blazing fast by today’s standards, but adequate for my purposes.
My last bill from Spectrum brought my monthly total to $96—for Internet service only.
I called Spectrum’s customer service line to see if anything could be done for me. Yes, they said, if I signed up for two cell phone lines!
My reply was: “Do one thing well first. Show me that you can provide the most competitive Internet access on the market, then we’ll talk about cell phones.”
Needless to say, that conversation wasn’t very productive.
I therefore took the step of signing up my house and my dad’s house (his Spectrum bill recently climbed to $114) with a local provider. We both were able to get 1 gig speed for less than I was paying for 400 Mbps.
Internet services have a high price elasticity of demand. This means that consumers will readily switch providers for a lower price. Spectrum has lost many residential customers in the Cincinnati area over the last two years with their pricing strategies, including many of my personal friends and relatives.
I am not sure what Spectrum’s grand strategy is for the Cincinnati market. It seems to be: lose as many residential customers as possible.
I have never had much faith in MBAs, and too many of them are making business decisions that should be entrusted to more serious and knowledgeable people. I suspect that MBAs have been turned loose in the planning department at Spectrum; but that’s just my best guess.
In any event, I did not really want to change my internet service provider. But Spectrum, almost a decade after acquiring my business through a corporate merger, finally boiled my frog.
-ET