If you’re a Verizon customer and you walk into the store to buy a new phone, you’d expect to be able to purchase the device right then and there, but apparently the carrier is forcing customers to pay for devices in monthly installments on their cell phone plan.
Splitting up your phone purchase into monthly installments is nothing new. However, as the customer, you generally have the option to do this but aren’t necessarily required to utilize the service. In some cases, splitting up your phone’s cost over a series of monthly payments locks you into a contract. So it’s understandable why some customers wouldn’t want to do this.
Some may just not like the idea of increasing their monthly bill for a phone upgrade purchase. Others might just prefer to pay for something in full if they have the money available. Then the purchase is done with, and it doesn’t end up as another monthly payment you have to worry about. According to Verizon customers over on the carrier’s official subreddit, full phone purchases sound like they’re discouraged. At the very least, it seems that sales reps may be discouraged from allowing it.
Verizon may be forcing monthly installments because it makes more money
You don’t necessarily end up paying more money for the phone, but you do have to spread that payment over a two-year or three-year period. This all depends on the cost of the phone. The point is that sales reps have the incentive to push these monthly installment plans because they make a commission on them. The more customers they get to use these plans, the more money they make.
And Verizon gets customers locked into years of monthly phone payments. From a customer standpoint, this can be a great service to take advantage of. If you don’t have all the money upfront, splitting up the phone cost into monthly payments makes things easier. But this isn’t everyone’s preference.
This might be limited to authorized retailers
As Phone Arena points out, Verizon seems to discourage sales reps from selling phones outright at its authorized retailers. It’s not clear if it’s the same at corporate stores.
According to some comments in the Reddit post, Verizon’s agreement with the authorized retailers includes selling the phone on an installment plan. It does seem to be possible to “pay for up to 90% of the phone as a downpayment,” while the remaining amount is split up over the installment plan. This way, there is some form of phone financing that happens.
Now, this doesn’t mean you will be outright denied if you try to pay for a phone in full at a Verizon authorized retailer. You might get pushback, but paying for a phone in full does seem possible. The original poster states that the people they worked with were against selling the phone outright at first. However, they were less reluctant to do so after the customer threatened to take their business to another carrier.
This whole method of commission payment no doubt puts sales reps between a rock and a hard place. They may want to honor the customers’ wishes, but then that means they lose out on sales commissions. At the end of the day, the fault here seems to lie with Verizon.
