Consumers beware: you have to keep a forensic eye on the deals for all the services you pay for. Otherwise, like me, you'll get shafted.
Idiot. More fool you. Serves you right. What did you expect? These were some of the things people said to me when I told them about something I had done, or rather not done, or rather - as I saw it - had done to me. I thought I was the victim. Others just thought me a bit of a pillock.
For years I had breakdown cover with the same well-known name. Let's call it SMBOBU Recovery. Skilled Mechanics But Otherwise a Bit Unscrupulous. I can't tell you how long I'd been with SMBOBU Recovery because I can't bear to look. I never had any problem with the service, not least because I never broke down. To be fair, the one time I remember calling on them, when my motorbike's battery went flat, the bloke turned up promptly and played a blinder. He couldn't get at the battery terminals to clip on his charger cables, so he executed a devilishly clever manoeuvre he called chopsticks. This involved poking a couple of long screwdrivers on to the terminals and clipping his clips on to them. Nice work, credit where it's due, etc.
My admiration might be why, when it came to what my cover was costing me, I took my eye off the ball. And in this world, in this iteration of capitalism, taking your eye off the ball costs you dear. I suppose I assumed that, yes, I was probably paying a bit more than new customers, but not so much more as to warrant getting into any faff fighting with a website or a call centre to get a better deal with SMBOBU Recovery or any of its competitors. I also vaguely assumed I might be getting some kind of discount for only ever once calling them out. If you say this fantastical thinking is partly down to me having more money than sense, then you'd have a point.
But imagine my surprise to find that my cover was costing me north of £500 a year. As far as I could see, this was well over three times what I'd be paying if I came to them as a nice new customer. After bashing my forehead firmly on my desk a couple of times, I went about the not entirely straightforward business of finding the auto renew tick box on the website. I clicked to untick the box with as much venom as my mouse could deal with, only to find that SMBOBU Recovery's website would not allow me to untick this box online. Oh no, I'd have to give them a call. After a good 10 minutes of waiting for an answer, puffs of steam that would have done Ivor the Engine proud were coming out of my ears. The chap on the line sucked his teeth a bit and said something like: "Right, let's see what we can do for you." Before long he conjured up a price much less than a third of what I'd been paying. There was something in his tone of voice that suggested that I ought to be grateful for his sterling efforts and the generosity SMBOBU Recovery was showing me in making this cut-price offer.
By now I was wound up like an old alarm clock, ready to make an unholy racket to register my considerable fury. I thought better of it. For one thing, none of it was this guy's fault. For another, he was on a hiding to nothing. To retain my custom he would have needed to say something like: "Good grief, we've been charging you how much? 500 quid!? For one motorbike? And you've only called us out once in all that time? I can't believe it. That's a disgrace. And in auto renewing you trusted us! The shame of it! What we're going to do is this: we'll cover you for £150 this year, and refund you the difference between that and whatever you've been paying for as long as you've been with us. Furthermore, we'll get hold of the mechanic who did the chopsticks thing, and he will personally be at your beck and call in perpetuity, following you everywhere you go, just in case of trouble."
As he said no such thing, I plotted my next move. I considered renewing the cover and then calling out a mechanic every day of the year, just to get my own back. In the end I settled for insisting - and, trust me, he needed some persuasion on this - that he cancel my auto renewal. I then called my bank to let them know that I wanted the auto renewal cancelled and was told that I'd done the right thing to contact them as it wasn't the first time they'd heard this story about SMBOBU Recovery.
Lesson learned. But what is the lesson? Obviously, tediously, whatever you're paying for - insurance, utilities, TV services, broadband, mobile phones, etc, etc - you need to watch them all like hawks. Take your eye off the ball and they'll steal your ball. This is now the default position for consumers. Do nothing, and sooner rather than later you'll get stiffed. All of the above areas of business exist, arguably, in bracingly competitive markets. This, you'd assume, overall exerts downward pressure on the prices consumers pay. But for which consumers? Most of them, possibly. But some more than others. And then there's the left behind. The ones, like me, who ought to know better but are too daft or dilatory to do anything about it. OK, limited sympathy. But what about those who may know better but lack the knowledge or help to navigate this minefield which is laid in shifting sands of changing prices, bewildering terms and conditions, apps, bots, websites and barely a trustworthy fellow human around to pick a path through it? Get involved and get befuddled. Or do nothing and get shafted.
I've now left SMBOBU Recovery behind for ever and got a great deal from somewhere else. But here's the thing: I still don't feel particularly good about it because in this zero sum game the seriously good deal I'm now getting is only possible because someone somewhere is paying way over the odds. More fool them? Speaking as a former fool myself I can't quite accept that.