A couple of days ago I got a bill from Time Warner Cable. This surprised me because we don’t subscribe to their service. Just as surprising was that the bill was addressed to me at the old address of this house (when we moved in out mailbox was a quarter mile away on the side of the street in a block of concrete — its a long story as to why). I was even more surprised to find that the bill was actually showing that I had a credit … of $0.60. Woo-hoo.
So, just in case there was something I wasn’t understanding that could lead to TWC sending me more bills that might be in their favor instead of mine I called their customer service. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find myself talking to a CSR within 60 seconds (although they might have voice stress analyzers to speed you through if you should, as I did, shout obscenities at the phone when none of the three thousand options I was offered proved to be of any use).
Anyway, it turned out that the bill was the result of TWC’s acquisition of Adelphia and I had had an account with them seven years ago! In the process of sorting out Adelphia’s accounts it appears TWC considered that old accounts with credits that Adelphia obviously decided were better kept than refunded (just think, $0.50 times half a million customers –now you’re talking real money!) were to be honored (which speaks volumes about the previous Adelphia management).
The rather humorless and disinterested CSR took my new address and said I would be getting a check in due order. This made me think … The cost of raising an invoice can be anything from a couple of dollars on upwards so my long lost $0.60 could easily be costing TWC $2 or $3 to refund to me! This is hardly sensible. Add to that the pollution caused by all of the mail carriers delivering snail mail, the forests that were chewed up to provide the paper on which the bills are printed, the gallons of water used to make the paper … its a long, long list of waste.
On the other hand if a company owes money there’s no earthly reason why they should get to profit from the thousands of little amounts that add up to a really big amount. Here’s an idea: Why not pass a bill that says that all customer credits that amount to less than $1 in any given year are aggregated by the service or product provider and paid annually to an environmental defense fund? Or poverty relief? Or anything other than wasting more money to refund next to nothing. If you consider just how many customer accounts are out there that we waste huge amounts of money on in the course of tying up the loose ends the results could be fantastic.
