Disclaimer: As a newbie to Germany, the blogster got a swanky 7Mbit/sec subscription from Telekom, only to find out that deep, deep in their terms and conditions buried on an obscure website, the pink giant promised a service of 13KBit/sec.**
And their "unlimited data plan" throttled down to the latter blazing speed after a few GB. So, we had a fight, which left the blogster with a free smartphone.
Some of the fallout of this dust up was captured in the old post New NEW Deutsche Telekom slogan.
As the country found out yesterday, the blogster was not the only person unhappy with the pink giant: Employees of that very Telekom gamed the company's customer loyalty bonus system and got themselves 40 million "Payback" points worth about 400 000 Euros.
The employees then took the points and went shopping at partner companies, for example, a drugstore chain.
For you linguists, the German term is "Payback-Punkte", the standard Denglish of Germans short on ideas.
The German media have had fun with the story but the blogster has its* own pathetically conservative view.
Loyalty programs suck.
Everybody who runs one will, if not in public, then in private, admit two things:
1) Loyalty programs create additional work and administrative costs.
2) These outlays are recouped by a combination of two facts. One, customers don't use the program, they lose receipts, let points expire and so forth. Two, everybody pays more than they otherwise would.
Deutsche Telekom won't suffer from this glitch, no worries. The former state company is deeply embedded into the German government.
So, if feel like paying too much, Telekom is a good choice.
* Gender neutrality, peeps.
** They upped this shortly after our fight, still laughable, though, and no connection to the quarrel.
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