Comment by ajkjk
14 days ago
The other part is: if there really is so much money in these, it should be easy for the companies to produce an actually good deal. Everyone can tell (after all these experiences) what bullshit smells like, when the deals are full of tricks. Why try the tricks--property taxes that pay eventually, jobs that will show up eventually, promises that electric bills won't go up--when you could guarantee the results, and guarantee the town won't be left holding the bag?
Well of course it's because the companies think they don't have to give a good deal. That they can get away with it.
One wonders if at this point they would have saved money not trying to fuck people over to get what they wanted. I hope so. The ideal world has companies doing things the honest way because it's honest, but I'd settle for them doing it that way because they're economically incentivized to do so.
Corporate America is trapped in a race to the bottom - if you do the 'right' thing and say, don't negotiate hard for tax breaks from the host city or get some sort of predatory preferred pricing from the utilities providers to the detriment of local residents, 1) your shareholders might go after you for not maximising profit and 2) your competitors will do these things anyway and undercut you.
mostly unrelated but amusing: I keep getting fliers from Google fiber trying to get me to switch. Every one has this one bizarre line in it: "our customers have never had their rates go up!"---as if I am too stupid to realize that is not a promise. Now, I have no idea if that works on other people. Maybe enough other people are stupid and don't notice that that's not a promise that turns out to be good ad copy. But I am personally so put off by the disrespectful attempt at manipulation that I consider switching less, even though it might well save me money. It is significantly worse for them, as a sales tactic, than if they had written nothing there at all.
You should switch to whatever is cheapest right now. If it gets more expensive, you should switch to whatever is cheapest right then. That's the market price signal that drives the good parts of capitalism.
This is based on the assumption that switching between operators/providers is quick and straight-forward. The reality of switching is that it is extremely time-consuming and emotionally-draining. These corporate practices should not be a thing, but the providers know that this hurts their profit-margins, so they "choose" to make very difficult.
that's one way of doing the calculation, which I do not subscribe to. The economic theory that markets develop according to the aggregate effects of rational actors does not invert into a moral imperative to you should do what money tells you. In fact it has no bearing on what one "should" do whatsoever.
As it happens they are competing on service quality and goodwill more than price (all will drop the price quite a bit if you ask because it's well over their costs and, bless, they are actually competing on price for once). I know that fiber's service is technically good but I resent Google enough that I will not give them money, all else being equal. Of course if I end up resenting the other providers more, maybe I would.
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