How to Cancel Spectrum Cable in Person and Why it’s Better than Calling

There are dozens and dozens of people on Reddit who have shared the laborious and time-consuming process of canceling their Spectrum cable accounts over the phone. There are horror stories about high-pressure sales tactics by “retention specialists” wasting up to an hour of time on the phone for something that should take five minutes. The experience is apparently so universal that Saturday Night Live even made a skit about it:

So when I had to help my Mom cancel her Spectrum cable account, I was concerned about the prospect of wasting a bunch of time and energy doing it. Happily, I was able to cancel her account quickly by using these four steps.

Why Canceling In Person is Better than Over the Phone

The Spectrum website says you have to call them to cancel your service. Once they have you on the phone, they can take their time with high-pressure sales tactics to retain you as a customer. But after that, you’re still not done because you have to return the equipment. Sure, you can mail it, but I was worried about it getting lost.

I wanted to avoid that, so I just took all of the equipment to a Spectrum store to cancel in one fell swoop.

Once we spoke to a customer rep at the Spectrum store, he collected our equipment and canceled our service in about three minutes! There was no high-pressure sales spiel because there was a line behind us, and he was too busy to mess around with a retention speech. All he asked was whether we were moving and I just said “no”, with no further questions asked!

We also dropped off our equipment right there so there was no extra step required to send it off.

It was awesome!

Four Tips for Cancelling Spectrum at a Store

Here are four tips to make your in-person Spectrum cancellation process go as smoothly as possible.

1. Make an appointment!

When we arrived at the Spectrum store, there were five people in front of us who looked like they had been there for a long time, and only one employee helping customers! We checked in and waited. After about ten minutes, when the line hadn’t moved, I was about to leave to try again some other day, when the employee called us to the front of the line!

It turns out, no one else had made an appointment. Since we did, we went straight to the front of the line ahead of everyone else!

So, before going to the store, visit the Spectrum website and make an appointment! If you don’t do this, canceling in person could take just as long (or longer) than canceling on the phone!

2. Choose a store that takes equipment exchanges

After you click “Find a Spectrum Store” on the website footer, be sure to first click “Visit store page” before you make an appointment at that store. Under “Store Services”, make sure you see “Equipment Exchange” as one of their services. It would really suck to show up at a store and then not be able to cancel because they don’t take equipment.

3. Make sure you bring all of Spectrum’s equipment

Mainly, you need to return the “black boxes”, i.e., any receivers, routers, or other devices that you got from Spectrum. Just to be safe, don’t forget about the remote controls as well. You don’t have to worry about returning any cabling they ran in your home.

4. Make sure you get a receipt!

Finally, don’t leave the store until you get a printed sheet of paper that says you returned the equipment. That way, there will be no disputing whether it was really returned or not!

Here’s the kicker: you need to keep that receipt for up to a year or more! Folks have reported charges for unreturned hardware up to a year later even though they returned their equipment!

The Final Insult

Of course, no Spectrum cancellation story could be over so easily. The day after we canceled and returned our equipment, my Mom got this email telling us to return the equipment we already returned!

We had the receipt, so we suspected that this was just an automated message, but we were uneasy. To be sure, we called Spectrum, and they confirmed that we indeed had returned all of our equipment.

So, don’t be surprised if you get this email even after returning your equipment!

Conclusion

So yeah, we did have to drive to a Spectrum store in person, and we did have to wait for about ten minutes in line, but overall, the experience of canceling Spectrum cable in person was reasonable other than the scare at the end.

How was your experience canceling Spectrum cable? If you did it over the phone, was it as bad as the folks say on Reddit? Please leave a comment below! – Brian