Reviews:
 ·RoadRunner Cable
 ·AT&T Midwest
 ·voip.ms
·MyPhoneCompany
| How about a customer's union? I hear all this complaining about providers and their crazy fees and I don't disagree.
I read the retort about capitalism and I don't disagree.
You don't like it, you go to another provider. Except that there's not enough competition to get "fair" rates and policies.
There's not enough competition because it costs a lot of money to get into the business: Barriers to entry are high.
Existing providers have a real interest in keeping others out of the business. They can buy others, they can undercut them until they go under and so on.
If the "government" tried to regulate them they would simply figure out what they had to lose and spend 10% of that on lobbying and campaign contributions.
Now, one thing that I don't hear a lot about is a customer's union. We all know that big customers get all kinds of deals because they bring in a lot of cash. Little guys get what's offered: No striking out unfavorable clauses, no confidential deals, and certainly no service level agreements.
Have you heard about these clubs in China where a whole bunch of people who want to buy the same thing get together and shop around? For example 500 people each want one Panasonic DVD player. They elect a negotiator who goes to a provider saying: "I'll buy 500 of these. How much?"
Can the same principal be applied in cases like this? Meaning you say "drop the $2 fee or my 50,000 friends and I are dropping you like a hot potato?" Scaling and administration would be an issue.
--
USNG:
16TDN2870
Find your Lat-Long:
Geocoder |
Reviews:
·Comcast
| They exist in the United States, too. They are called *buyers' clubs* and *cooperatives*. UCC TotalHome (now DirectBuy) and Costco (formerly Price Club) originated as buyers' clubs. (One of the oldest cooperatives in the United States is the Greenbelt (MD) Cooperative, which dates back to the Great Depression. The Cooperative still owns and runs the supermarket serving the town of the same name, which is still homebase for the Cooperative.) Most rural electric utilities are also organized on the cooperative model (and yes, you can even find such cooperatives in the seemingly un-rural suburbs of Washington, DC), as are most rural telcos (especially in Iowa, Indiana, Arkansas, and Kansas). |
