Re: Good Bye Allstate Insurance
Well, there's agents and there's companies. Neither has a monopoly on stupidity ... or good sense.
I can't say we've ever had a really obnoxious agent, but a couple have come close. In my previous career, we lived in 10 cities / 6 states. We were used to calling around and getting insurance quotes, and still do that every 3 or 4 years. We've dealt with probably a dozen companies over the past 50 years -- Allstate more than once. Even for national companies, sometimes it seems they just want to not do business in a given area, so they jack their premiums way up, encouraging you to go elsewhere.
A dozen years ago, in west Michigan, we were back with Allstate. Our agent was ok, but suddenly their premiums went way up. We changed to a different company for about half the premiums we were paying. Strange thing, the guy who was our Allstate agent quit Allstate a couple months later and became an independent agent -- for the same agency we went through (although no longer ours). He wrote all of his former clients telling them it seemed to him Allstate was intentionally pricing themselves out of this market.
Right now, we're with a regional, Michigan-based company (Citizen's) for cars and house. They really don't want to insure boats (very high premiums), so we stayed with Progressive on line (no agent). Progressive won't write homeowner policies.
Strange how some companies seem so competitive in one area for one type, and not others.
