I Got Blood From A Stone!

Last week when I came home there was a door tag looped around the handle of my front gate. It was an advertisement. Normally, I take a quick glance to see which of the local pizza places is offering a special deal and then move it on to the logical recycling bin. But this one wasn't offering two medium two topping pizzas for just nine dollars. This one came from Xfinity, the cable, Internet, telecommunications beast. The bargain they wanted to let me know about by leafleting my neighborhood was a forty dollar a month deal on cable TV and Internet. I bypassed the recycling bin and carried the flyer into the house with me. How could I pass this up?
Okay. That last bit was a bit rhetorical, since I knew that this screaming deal was an offer to new customers only and the whole idea was to get those households not already under the spell of the tentacles of the monster that was once Comcast into proximal comfort for two years and then proceed to bleed them dry over the next decade or so.
I know this because it has been my experience. Which is essentially why I called the toll-free number at the bottom of the flyer. When the sales consultant came onto the line, he asked how he could help me and I requested the forty dollar a month deal. "Are you already a customer?" was the question that derailed my nefarious scheme. But only slightly.
I went ahead and asked how it could be that new customers could be offered such a pittance, comparatively, to what I was paying while someone like me who had been subscribing to their services since the twentieth century just had regular hikes to their bill. Why not, I suggested to my sales representative, offer deals to those long-term customers as a reward for their loyalty? I understand that the forty-dollar-deal was a no-frills package designed to give newbies a taste, but I still couldn't make the math work on a pro-rated scale. I wanted to pay less, but I didn't want to give anything up. Then he said the magic words: "Let me see what I can do."
Once he was finished putting my special package together, I was losing two of six Starz channels but gaining Internet speed, and everything else stayed the same. For eighty dollars less per month. Decorum suggests that I don't allow for what fraction of my bill disappeared, but suffice it to say that I am still paying more than forty dollars a month. But saving eighty over what I had been. This experience reminded me of two powerful lessons: First, advertising works. Second, I know how much Xfinity rakes in a year and this interaction let me know that they are fine without my eighty dollars a month.
As long as I keep paying them something.