$14,000 for a Phone
Sep 15th, 2006 by Brian A. Thomas
$14,000 for a phone? No, it isn’t for some high tech phone, or even a collectible, but just an old rotary dial phone that has been leased for 42 years. The family claims the total money paid for the phone rental is $14,000. Lucent, who handles the phone rentals, says it is “about $2,000” [free registration required for that site, you skip registering with Bugmenot]since 1985 as they don’t have records of how much was paid before that. I am rather shocked that they get away with charging $29.10 a month or even quarterly as Lucent claims to rent out an old or even new phone. Even brand new phone at the store can runs less then $50 even if it is cordless. If they charged $25 to $30 a year, perhaps that would be one thing, but to charge nearly $30 a month/quarterly is a rip-off. The crazy part is that Lucent says they have 750,000 people still leasing phones from them. The benefit of leasing? Free replacement, big deal when you are paying more then the cost of a new phone in two payments. And if you really want an old rotary style phone, then eBay has them for less then $10, which means one payment would get you two of them.
Lucent really needs to send a notice to their 750,000 leasing customers and making sure they know their options, otherwise they may face a lawsuit for damages. Even if they only pay back fees paid since 1985, that times 750,000 customers is a ton of money. Say all those customers paid $2000 as Lucent claims this lady paid since 1985, that is still $1,500,000,000 in back fees (over a tenth of their 10.26 million market cap). Oddly this story isn’t on the market watch news reports about Lucent, which if I owned Lucent stock, I would want to know about this potential lawsuit before it happened.
