Using a discount I shouldn't be (cell phone, price, discounts, deal)

[NJDevil]

You know how you get discounts on some things as a perk from a job, well I left the job a while back but I'm still using a discount on something (don't want to say what). Has anyone else ever done this? I don't have a job so the discount is helping me, but I don't know if the company will ever check. It may not be a big deal to them because maybe my previous employer makes up the difference. How do you all feel about it?

[texdav]

As long as your paying them they most like don't care as it is a promotion to get groups sales most likely and your company is paying nothing.If on company sales or products they will catchup most likely.

[nancy thereader]

I don't know. If you are asking the question, you probably already know the answer........

[GloryB]

We get discounts for a whole variety of services through the company I work for.....such as cell phone providers. If I were no longer employed with them, I would continue paying the current fee until the end of the contract....then I would sign up for regular price. I would not use the other available discounts for getting my hair cut or whatever if I left the job.

[NJDevil]

Thank you, that makes sense. Just wondered how other people dealt with this kind of thing.

[Stripes17]

I still use the discount on my cell provider that was for the company I left 5 years ago! My new company has the same discount, and I even tried to cutover to it, but the cell provider never made the switch. So, i just leave it the way it is. I feel okay with that decision since I tried to make it right.

[AksarbeN]

The OP question comes down to a point of “what do you personally feel is the right thing to do?” when you no longer are working for the company. This tends to allow our personal conscience to deal with the issue. If you feel you don’t deserve the discount, then stop using it.

On a legal aspect when you first started using the discount was there an agreement made with the retailer that it only could only be used while that company employed you?

[Ceece]

I'm getting a discount now on something that I'm not sure I should be getting. The business has an online site set up for you to enter your email into (from a school or business) to see if you qualify. Curious, I entered my school email address and it came up with an 18% corporate discount for a company I don't work for. Either it's just coming up with the wrong company name or it's flat out wrong. Either way I don't feel bad since I just followed the instructions.

[BigDGeek]

I used to work for an insurance company and enjoyed my employee discount on my insurance for years after I left that company. As long as you kept the original policy, you were still entitled to the discount. Big deal!

[harry chickpea]

My thought is that discounts thwart the whole concept of fair play and skew the marketplace. The most egregious examples are in the health"care" industry, where an a provider will accept terms from an insurance company to pay $20 for a test, but that same test would be charged out to an individual at $100.

Another example is "senior" and "child" pricing at movie theatres. Being a certain age is no indicator of how much value a movie has. That "discount" is a marketing ploy that places a burden on the people buying full-price tickets. At flat pricing, overall prices could be 10% to 20% less, but the market now has institutionalized the price structure.

Overall and in general, discounts are often really a reduction to the core price that a company can make a small but reasonable profit. The un-discounted price is a "what the market will bear" price. As long as I'm not breaking any law, I'll take any discount I can get.