Last week I posted about my very upsetting experience with Verizon. A few days later, a regular reader of EconLog, who tells me he has learned a lot from reading EconLog, wrote me about the issue. He has a fairly high-level position at Verizon and told me that he basically agreed with me that Verizon had handled it badly. He asked me if I would give him our two cell phone numbers so that he could pass them on to someone who could make things right. I did a little due diligence first and found out he’s a real person who is who he says he is. So I gave him the numbers. (Later he sent me some testimony in which he had used, and used correctly, the Thinking on the Margin Pillar of Economic Wisdom that I have posted about.)

A few minutes ago I got a call from Sarah at Verizon. She agreed with me that by lining up the $40 per month per phone service in advance, I had done what I needed to do to actually get that service and not get the more-expensive one that I had explicitly rejected and that I was being charged for. She noted that I had had my bill reduced by $50, leaving me paying $30 too much. She said that Verizon would go ahead and refund (I paid 2 days ago) the other $30 and, in addition, refund me the $80 that I had paid for the service.

Victory!

Question for the commenter (I’m looking at you, James) on the previous post who said that because of this experience I should favor more government regulation of cell phone companies: have you ever had this kind of generous responsiveness from the U.S. Postal Service, which is the ultimate in government regulation because it is a government agency?