Just curious....Why is everyone going into the store to pay the ETF? Why not just let it hit your final bill and pay it online or in the mail?
I'm a verizon customer, and this is just unprofessionalism coming from their reps if this is going on. A similar example: I'm an apartment property manager and we have competitors too. We used to pay all the utilities for our residents and it was a HUGE selling point for our community. One of our competitors also always paid utilities for their tenants as well.
About 2 years ago my company decided that we wanted to stop paying utilities for the residents and billed it back to the tenants. We did this mostly for financial reasons, greed, to make more money, but we also did not do the correct amount of research to learn exactly what we could lose by doing this. Verizon passed on iPhone due to financial reasons and lack of market research as well.
Well, 2 years later I still have tenants leaving left and right and probably about 30-40% (sound familiar) of who I lose goes to our competing apartment community. It does bother me because I know that our company dropped the ball on this, however I still have to treat people who are moving out with respect because, well, you never know. Maybe one day we'll change our stance on utilities and try to win some of those customers back. But I could NEVER say that paying for utilities is not a huge competitive advantage because I know it is.
If Verizon is really trying to tell their reps about how much better the storm or whatever they have is than the iPhone, Verizon is going to be the ones hurting from all this. They need to realize it is a superior device and maybe try to figure out how to compete with it rather than trashing it to their former customers.