{"id":34,"date":"2005-05-07T11:45:02","date_gmt":"2005-05-07T15:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/2005\/05\/07\/customer-service-as-product-coupon\/"},"modified":"2005-05-07T11:45:02","modified_gmt":"2005-05-07T15:45:02","slug":"customer-service-as-product-coupon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/2005\/05\/customer-service-as-product-coupon\/","title":{"rendered":"Customer Service as Product Coupon"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Recently Rachel’s Treo 300 gave out for the second time (the device’s hinge is a well-known<\/a>
\nweakness). After hours of calls to Sprint customer service (the magic
\nword
\nturned out to be “design defect”) and “forum shopping” trips among the
\ndifferent Sprint Stores in our area, she finally wheedled out a
\nreplacement 300 from customer service. (Why it makes sense to
\nreplace a defective product with the same thing is unclear to me). Now,
\nif our time was worth real money, we’d just plunk down another $coupla
\nhundred for a replacement phone… but since it’s not, she spent the
\ntime fighting for a replacement phone. So in this case, customer
\n“service” is just another form of price differentiation: those who can
\npay full price do so for the convenience; the rest of us get our
\ncoupons in exchange for hard labor.<\/p>\n

In
\nany event, the happy ending is that the Brookline that supposedly had
\n300’s in stock didn’t, so Rachel got a replacement Treo 600! Now she’s
\nwell on the path to
\nGadget Geekery.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently Rachel’s Treo 300 gave out for the second time (the device’s hinge is a well-known weakness). After hours of calls to Sprint customer service (the magic word turned out to be “design defect”) and “forum shopping” trips among the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[414],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anderkoos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}