Sprint doesn’t like old customers – just new ones. So we switched to Verizon.

My wife had been with Sprint for about six years, and I’d been with them for the last two. We thought they had great service, fair prices, and we had every intention of staying with them. Our two year contract had expired a couple months ago, so we went to Radio Shack in search of new phones (and a new contract to go with them).

In a move that I thought was eliminated a few years ago, the price for a phone with a new two-year contract was $100 less than the price for a two-year contract renewal. What? I thought everyone said your biggest expense was to get new customers. If that was the case, wouldn’t you work hard to keep your existing ones?

The folks at Radio Shack were understanding and somewhat apologetic. I told them flat out that it was stupid, and asked if they could do anything about it. Long story short – we could cancel our Sprint account (since we were out of contract), sign a new contract (with new numbers) and get the deal. We decided to hold off and left the store.

I remembered passing a Verizon store on the way to Radio Shack, so we decided to look around there. I won’t ever use Cingular (for reasons I’ll get into some other day), I’m scared to use the perpetually “new” AT&T, and T-mobile lost my business a few years ago. That essentially left Sprint and Verizon.

The Verizon store was impressive. Like most stores, it took a few minutes to get help from an employee, but once we got her she was great. We snuck in just before they closed, and even after they had locked the doors (and probably were anxious to get home), she took her time, found us some very cool cheap phones (LG VX9800) and we were good to go.

Note to phone companies: you want our business! We have two phones, a bunch of minutes, we pay extra for internet, we pay extra for text messaging, we buy some ringtones, etc – all of that garbage that is way overpriced that we can’t live without. 🙂

Over the next two years, we’ll probably spend around $2400 on our phones. Sprint needed to save $200 since we weren’t “new”.