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Comment by grayhatter | Hacker News Reader

who sold you on that lie? The article has me believing T-Mobile said "your lifetime", given they were also exclusively marketing that to people over the age of 55, it seems obvious that a reasonable person would conclude that meant the remainder of the named individual's life. Which does seem to be the conclusion many people drew, given the number of complaints to the FTC.

Just because lifetime guarantee does often mean "reasonable lifetime of the product", which does differ, and requires reasonable maintenance, doesn't mean you can just make shit up. Otherwise you put yourself in this very position where you need to argue and prove exactly what a reasonable person would conclude the contract meant.

Words don't suddenly become meaningless just because the "fine print" is ambiguous.

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Words and phrases definitely have meanings in contract law, established by precident. They are not always what the layman would presume they mean however.

I'll accept that there could be precedent to use non-layman definitions of certain words, but how do you apply that justification to this quote from TFA:

> "T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan," the company said in a pledge that enticed many people to switch plans or even switch from another carrier to T-Mobile.

I don't think it's reasonable to use anything but regular definitions for the words in that particular quote.

Rather, they are pulling this off a completely different way:

> "We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost."

So the price of the service is not changing during the reasonable lifetime of the service nor the lifetime of the consumer. Rather, the service is no longer being offered.

> Rather, the service is no longer being offered.

And this is probably permitted in the fine print of the offer. They did not just make this up in their marketing department without at least some consideration of the ways they could escape from it.

That is infuriating corp speak. I'm sympathetic if a business can't fulfill its obligations, nobody wants to fail. If they had admitted they messed up and wanted to fix it then I honestly would be okay with that.

But to try to ditch their responsibility with a technicality is so scummy. I don't have T-Mobile, and with that one line of corp speak I never will

For sure, I don't mean to say it's right. Just that they don't seem to be leveraging non-layman definitions of words. The plan's price will never change really doesn't imply the plan's existence will never change even to a layman, I would think, unless their train of thought is more like paying for this line than paying for this plan which would be problematic. This is in stark contrast to things like lifetime warranties of physical goods (where "lifetime" needs some legal definition) since some physical goods do indeed last virtually forever.

The sad thing is T-Mobile knows this and are banking on the fact that ATT or Verizon or pretty much any carrier you go to, will eventually pull something similar.

We seem to have reached a point where there is effectively no place you can get decent customer service as an ordinary consumer. It's either, have enough money to sue the crap out of companies, or shut your mouth and endure.

Decades of demonization of regulations has led to a point where the Govt's ability to enforce them is effectively null. With the regulators out of the picture, T-Mobile knows the only real recourse you have is the courts and that a vanishingly small percentage of customers will take that path.

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