I emailed the CEO of T-Mobile and he killed my contract

If two people owned all of the houses in your city and colluded on pricing, types of houses available and only did business with their bank — then your comparison would be true.

I was a T-Mobile customer off and on for about 7 years total. For the last contract I had signed with them, I made sure that I would be able to get out of my contract if I A: moved due to a military PCS, or B: Moved due to getting out of the military. The T-Mobile rep at the store assured me that I would be able to get out of my contract under those circumstances, and so I signed up with them when I arrived at my last duty station.

When I left the military, and moved shortly after, I contacted a very helpful T-Mobile rep that told me everything was in order and that all I had to do was send him a copy of my discharge paperwork (which are still considered to be valid active duty military orders) and the early termination fees would be waived. After he cancelled my account, I received a ~$700 bill and a letter that said my paperwork had been declined.

I called and talked to a support rep, who in turn forwarded me to a manager that had no more authority than the representative. T-Mobile purposely creates powerless management positions in order to delude customers into thinking that there is nothing supervisors can do to handle customer service issues. Ultimately, they decided to continue to charge me the ETFs because they were already having a really bad year for customer retention.

The really ridiculous part of this mess is that I was perfectly happy with T-Mobile, yet I was forced to move to a state that doesn't have a single T-Mobile tower because I didn't have any luck finding employment elsewhere. I would have returned to T-Mobile as soon as possible, but my experience with their customer service has opened my eyes to what a shitty company it is.

Consider how much different things would be if people had month-to-month service contracts and they financed their phone upgrades separately (though the payments were rolled together). Imagine if people could just pay off their device debt, cancel their contract, and move to a new carrier. Or imagine if people could pay off their device debt in advance to avoid the interest payments. Or imagine if people could roll their old device debt into a new loan for a new device, and then carry that forward. It's funny how a phone company will give you $500 in financing for a new phone no problem but they outright refuse to give you $550 or $600.

I imagine most consumers would probably prefer a more transparent system like this, but the problem is that then they would see how much they are getting shafted. People are locking themselves in to $2k commitments when in reality they should only be committed to $500. Sure there's also service attached but a lot of people don't use a lot of cell data or make many phone calls. Most people could probably get buy on the cheapest virgin mobile plan, for example, which is just $35/mo.

So let's do the math. People who are locked into phone contracts due to their device upgrades are locked into about $1150 of extra payments. That works out to an effective APR right around 99.8%!

It's no wonder that phone companies like things the way they are, confusing and complicated. It allows them to charge usurious interest rates on device purchases without their customers fully realizing.

When was this?

I was a long-time T-Mobile customer until a few years ago, and I always had excellent customer service experiences with them.

The only reason I switched was because I moved to NYC, and they had terrible reception here at the time - I couldn't place calls in my own bedroom.

Even then, though, we were able to break our entire family contract (which I believe we had only just re-signed a couple of months before) without paying an ETF[0].

[0] This is despite the fact that (a) I was the only one in the family plan who was in NYC, and (b) my zip code was in their coverage map (which means that they had no legal obligation to let me off the contract).

I've been considering going back to T-mobile; if their customer service really has gone downhill in the last few years, maybe I'll think about AT&T instead....