When I'm not satisfied with my barber, I find another. If my lawyer embarrasses me in court, I can hire someone else. If my exterminator refuses to kill roaches, I can get one who will. Such is the beauty of America. We have the freedom to choose where to spend our money. That is unless we're dealing with public utilities.
In a world where corporations are people, the likes of Con Edison represents the worst of human nature. They raise rates with wanton disregard for consequences. They force you to install equipment that pulses electromagnetic waves through your skull then tell you that it improves efficiency. And they can be absurdly unprepared for a storm, leave 70,000 people in cold darkness, and - just to underscore their incompetence - not fix the problem for days. A customer’s only recourse is to publicly berate them online, hence where we find ourselves now.
Somehow, history’s most brilliant economists have been outsmarted by the relentless underachievers that run Con Ed. I think if Adam Smith were alive today, he'd glare at his electric bill every month with contempt only to realize that even in capitalist America, he has no other choice. Then, after freezing in his powerless home for four days after Friday's storm, he'd want to slap Con Ed in the face with an invisible hand just like the rest of us. I know the feeling.
Con Ed's excuse is that Friday's nor'easter was the fifth worst storm they've ever encountered. That's like telling your teacher that you didn’t do the homework because it was the fifth hardest assignment of your life. In no way does that validate your failure. Instead, its an example of what I call aggressive mediocrity: a concept that shines in virtually everything Con Edison does, unlike the lights in most of Westchester which didn't shine for days.
The sad thing is that lots of vulnerable people are suffering, and some even died in the storm. Yet Con Ed decided to take their sweet time getting enough crews on the ground. If this had been the fourth largest storm, maybe it would have been different.
When all is said and done, Con Ed will ultimately restore the power. They will take a public beating and likely make an excuse that somehow shifts the blame onto its own customers. And then, when we all move on, they will proceed to continue screwing us. For our part, we'll keep paying our bills and quietly fume about the fact that in a land of consumer choice, we are stuck in a dysfunctional relationship with a such an aggressively mediocre company. And it will go on like this until the next deadly storm. But I find solace in the fact that this bitter blog post will exist on the internet forever. It will be accessible for people to read anytime they like, as long as they have electricity.
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