What is "the big lie"?   You see it all the time in newspaper and TV ads that state" protect your home and property for only $24.95 monthly, 5 year contract, with a free alarm system complete with two door contacts and one motion detector". This simply cannot be done for 99.9% of homes !!!  This is strictly a "lowball" marketing tactic by the mass marketers of alarm systems to get their salesman's foot in your door, and frankly in this writer's opinion, borders on unethical business practices (or at the very least misleading advertising). This is a standard tactic by those whose primary interest is not always the completeness of the system they install, but rather the drive to sign you up to a binding contract for monthly monitoring revenues to ensure themselves a continuous profitable revenue stream. Once their commissioned salesman has done his "security audit"  you generally end up buying additional very expensively priced equipment to provide sufficient security to properly do the job (most houses on average use 3 doors and 2 to 3 motion detectors to provide a reasonable level of protection). However, had you done your shopping in advance before calling one of these mass marketers, you could easily have obtained better and more modern equipment, for less or equal money, and not been subject to long term contracts, expensive after sales service, and often very limited warranty on the equipment.

A monthly term monitoring contract without a long term commitment, coupled with ownership of the equipment, puts you the consumer in the drivers seat against impersonal, overpriced and sometimes shoddy service from your alarm company. Good companies don't need a long term contract to keep your business ! It is a fact that in this industry today, there is virtually no money in selling and installing the actual alarm system itself (thanks in large part to these same mass marketers).  Only monitoring brings in recurring revenues for all dealers large and small.

This said, one cannot argue with the fact that this marketing tactic works, and works well. I can only conclude that this is a clear and indisputable example of the triumph of slick marketing prevailing over common sense and intelligent shopping !!!!! 

Trust is a primary factor in choosing a security system provider. If this deception is part of their initial approach to winning your business, one can only wonder what other deceptions big or small await the buyer in dealing with these types of firms !!

Don't fall for it!  Do your comparison shopping before you call that mass marketer. Calculate your total overall costs over five years for a complete system and compare on that basis, remembering as well that you will be dealing with this company or person for the long term.

Recently, a newcomer to the market, heavily promoted in the marketplace through TV ads, and peddling a poor quality "two way voice" system, has become quite successful in spite of being little better than a scam. They use unsupervised, very low quality wireless equipment with no proper line exclusion, and are without doubt the very worst option a client could ever choose. The fact that most of their clients are totally sold on their system is in itself a reflection of the triumph of sales technique over true security. 

Unfortunately, in the security business it very much remains, "let the buyer beware "