Loyalty is seldom rewarded!

In an age where credit card companies are stepping onto each other to come up with their most alluring programs to reward customers who had stuck with their bank, I have increasingly come to notice a lot of other closer-to-life places where things are exactly the opposite. Let me give you two examples :-

1. In the (Indian) IT industry if you stick with a company for 4-5 years without jumping around like a frog, in all probability you will be earning a lot less than the next door "Mr. FROG" (a.k.a someone who has changed say 5 jobs in 5 years). Our frog would have received atleast a 40-50% hike with every jump. Poor you, who has worked your a** off with the same company is deemed worthless. Even if you are the top 5% of the company, you would at the max get a 8% jump in your salary year-on-year. So much for loyalty. Its like if you are at the same place you must not be good enough to jump like a frog!!

2. This is something peculiar I witnessed in US especially with Cable companies and Apartment offices. Lets take apartments first, if you religiously keep jumping every 12 months, there is a huge chance that you will end up paying around 100-150 USD lesser after a year, even if you would have moved from say #421 to #420. If you stick around (poor you!) you end up paying a premium of 30 USD extra per month, so yes your rent is actually increasing though you are living in the exact same house from the past 3 years and your neighbor (yes Mr. FROG) is reaping all the benefits.

Now comes cable companies - almost all of them have promotional tariffs for the first 6 months. Also prices for the same kind of service reduces over time but who gets these benefits?? NO, not the loyal customer who took this connection 3 years back but the cheesy Mr. FROG who had been religiously changing service providers every 6 months.

So what do we do? Is it good to be a Mr. FROG?

P.S. And yes - you guessed it right. Both of the above are chronicles of first-hand experiences.