There are two items that bother the hell out of me very often and it would make a difference to me personally if I felt that my senator was out there trying to do something about them:
1. Verizon is a monopoly for local telephony and acts like one.
2. The airline industry is abusing its customers and nobody is stopping them.
More specifically:
Verizon: I run a $5 million a year company selling legal consulting services. We are at the mercy of Verizon because nobody else owns the last mile of copper phone lines into our or any business and is in a position to provide us with local telephone services. We had 3 service outages last month and lost nearly a month’s profit as well as goodwill of customers who tried our competitors. I have been waiting over a month for Verizon to fix our problems and they haven’t.
We have had nothing but heartache for 5 years from Verizon since we have been in business. We once tried to have AT&T install a residential line and gave up after 2 months because AT&T couldn’t get an install appointment from Verizon. Repair at Verizon means being shunted between 3 different departments for days, all of whom write up duplicate or erroneous tickets and then close them out without contacting the customer without fixing anything. They send out field technicians without proper training and then refuse to send backups with training when their own technicians call for it.
I have no real ability to go to the NY Public Service Commission because nobody thinks they care or can do anything. Verizon feels no reason to compensate me for my trouble and I can’t go to another company. Not only do I personally hate Verizon as a company but I have yet to meet a Verizon employee who has something positive to say about the company. Verizon is an oversized and tax-and-fee-subsidized bureaucratic monster that doesn’t function but that has no incentive to change and is so heavily represented with lobbyists that they have no fear of the law or of you, I fear. New Yorkers deserve much better than this truly outrageous situation that dampens the ability of business to conduct business.
Airlines: Do you know what it means to buy an airline ticket today? It is almost impossible to buy a ticket that is refundable. On many routes, they don’t even sell refundable tickets. If a husband and wife have to change their tickets, at $100 per domestic ticket that’s $200 in change fees with the legacy carriers (the amount is twice that for international tickets). Change fees can negate the cost of the tickets meaning the money is wasted. On many routes, there is no competition between airlines meaning there is no choice as to who to fly if you want to fly nonstop. Most airlines do not allow assignment of tickets claiming security reasons. That’s crock because several airlines such as JetBlue and Southwest allow for this. These profitable airlines also have much lower change fees at $25 per ticket and their maximum ticket prices are much lower; I just bought two nonrefundable tickets to Europe for over $900 apiece on Continental and had to cancel for health reasons and am trying to figure out how to get close to $2,000 back and am looking at $400 in change fees. That’s a lot of money for ordinary people and it cannot be argued that they had any choice in the matter and therefore willingly agreed to pay such fees, especially since most airlines don’t even disclose the amount of these fees when they sell the tickets. Try buying a ticket and see the ambiguity of the change fees disclosed at the point of sale.
Ordinarily, the law prefers assignability of property. Only with airline tickets does it seem enshrined that this is not so. Airlines have moved toward electronic tickets and there are no real costs anymore associated with changes or assignments but nevertheless the fees have become colossal, the waivers of which have become nonexistent except in case of death (even a coma wouldn’t suffice these days), and the nonrefundability of a ticket has become extraordinarily entrenched — all of which are means for airlines to hold onto cash and to generate additional sources of revenue. Frequent flyer programs are terribly abusive to customers, can be changed without notice (and often are) and do not deliver what they promise. Even though they are “rewards” they are expensive to obtain, and yet heavily internally regulated within the airlines and nevertheless subject to arbitrariness on the part of airlines that they ought to be treated as items purchased for value given the immense investment placed into these schemes by American consumers who have absolutely no protection despite the grand alliances of companies that conspire in these programs and benefit from these one-sided programs that have the effect of raising everyone’s ticket prices to pay for them in excess of the benefit extended to those who try to cash in on them. These programs ought to either be discontinued as a hidden tax on the industry as a whole or regulated to give safeguards to consumers.
Despite arguments to the contrary by industry, there is no freedom of contract here and customers can’t even reach responsive customer service personnel anymore. Call United and your customer service agent is sitting in Mumbai — he or she doesn’t care whether you fly United and comes from a cultural mindset that you are to follow the rules of the carrier, no matter how extortionate or ridiculous. The amount of discretion vested in these employees is so minimal that it doesn’t even pay to talk to them anymore.
I run a profitable business and would never treat my customers the way Verizon and the legacy carriers treat their customers (if I hoped to remain profitable). The joke here is that these legacy airlines are all bankrupt and the only ones that are profitable are the small carriers that are restricted because of the constant resuscitation given to the legacy carriers by government. Again with the airline industry I have to believe that if not for the immense lobbying power these airlines have and the industry-friendly regulators in government, these outrages would never be tolerated if real people had any say in government regulation.
I just don’t feel that government either has any idea of what it means to deal with the local telco or to fly on airplanes in America. If government does know, then either they don’t care or just don’t feel that it is possible to change anything. I cannot understand the conditions we tolerate. I do know that if I were to run for Congress, these would be my issues and I think they resonate among real people who, like me, don’t care if you do nothing else but do something to make our lives better in a way that is meaningful to us. We have to make and take phone calls to do business and we have to be able to get on airplanes in a convenient manner in order to go places. These are among the basic necessities of life today.
That people should waste hours dreaming up city combinations to buy roundtrip tickets for half the price of one-way tickets and then be told that throwing away the unused ticket is illegal when an airline does not offer rational prices to begin with is what we live with today. Not to mention air fares changing several times a day with people sitting in similar seats paying up to eight times the price as their neighbor. My wife and I for all intents and purposes paid 180,000 frequent flyer miles for 2 business class tickets to Australia and my wife sat in coach for a 6 hour leg when there were 11 empty seats in business class because the airline wouldn’t release a business class seat to her because their quota for frequent flyer seats was filled. We received no compensation or even sympathy because we were told that we hadn’t paid anything and had no right to anything and the customer service agents had no discretion to override company rules. Customer service agents in India who put people on hold for half an hour to make sense of vouchers issued in the United States that they cannot understand. Jet Blue on the other hand is not a legacy carrier: All tickets are one-way tickets; the fares follow a consistent pattern and the people answering the phone are inside the US who know what they are doing and who find ways to say Yes instead of No when asked for a dose of humanity.
American business and our economy are not all that they can be because we tolerate this level of mediocrity from our telcom baby bells and our airlines. Anybody who wants to conduct business is only as good as the phone service provided by the telco, and anyone who wants to travel is only as good as the airline that provides carriage. I personally am ashamed of what the US airline industry has become especially in light of progress being made in the rest of the world. I would be very happy if we just let the legacy carriers die or at least opened up the playing field to true competition in both these industries. Maybe people will get hurt and lose their jobs for the short term, but the long term will benefit the greater good as well as the unhappy employees of these companies that will never see the dawn with companies that cannot and will not change.
Maybe these are beyond any senator’s capacity to effect change. But it would be tremendously useful is a senator thought that he or she could try to do something about it and even better if someone raised enough of a fuss that would cause people in the industry to begin to fear the wrath of consumers as expressed by their representatives in government.
Please think about these items and see if you can make a difference. If you can move the US toward world-class telephony and air travel, the country will have better tools to conduct business and its citizens can spend much more time doing more productive tasks as well as eliminate an important source of anxiety and financial hardship for ordinary people.
