How to screw an American Consumer 101: (2nd in a series of 3)

Singular telephone, multiple tortures

We all have cell phones now. The choice of phones is amazing. The functions are astonishing. Your little cell phone now, can work in outer Uzbekistan too with only that little SMS card change. You can download games and music, make pictures, send pictures, receive emails and lots of other goodies.

How about not loosing a signal on the corner of State and Main?

Now the signal strength is usually dependant on the number of transmitters and their good functioning in your area. Common logic suggests that your reception will be better outdoor, than indoors where there are walls or other type of obstacles to the signal (wood, concrete, radio waves, microwave oven signals, TV signals, etc.) So most outdoor places our phones should work just fine – but they don’t. Suppose the cellular telephone companies knew that the signal can be the biggest problem. What would they do? Fix the signal? NO. They would sell you the idea of fixing the signal while the signal still remains poor. Just look at America’s largest Cellular company Cingular Wirelless. Their motto for a few months now has been “raising the bar” – just after they acquired AT&T.

You may have heard of Anti-Trust Laws or the Sherman Act. If you didn’t it’s just as well. Those are not real Laws. Those are all make believe Laws that nobody ever wants to uphold. Let me give you a brief theoretical overview: “Trusts and monopolies are concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few. Such conglomerations of economic resources are thought to be injurious to the public and individuals because such trusts minimize, if not obliterate normal marketplace competition, and yield undesirable price controls. These, in turn, cause markets to stagnate and sap individual initiative.”

So the creation of monopolies are not, in a manner of speech, The American way, they may obliterate competition and the end user (customer) is the one who is paying the highest price. Continuing onwards it says: “To prevent trusts from creating restraints on trade or commerce and reducing competition, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. The Sherman Act was designed to maintain economic liberty, and to eliminate restraints on trade and competition. The Sherman Act is the main source of Antitrust law.”

So it is the United States Congress that passed this law. It must have been a very serious state of affairs if our Congress was involved.

You may remember a few decades ago there was a lot of talk about deregulating. Passenger aviation was deregulated, we lost Pan AM, TWA, Eastern Airlines. Telephone service was also deregulated in order to prevent MaBell from the monopoly so that Lilly Tomlin will no longer have a field day impersonating a MaBell telephone operator – with every sketch closing “We are Bell – and we don’t give a damn”

Now follow me on this one more closely. MaBell was split into AT&T and various “baby Bells” – if I remember correctly. One of those baby Bells was BellSouth. Some 8 years ago BellSouth gave birth to BellSouth Mobility. Some 5 years ago BellSouth Mobility grew big and strong and renamed itself Cingular. Earlier this year Cingular bought AT&T wireless. Is it only me, or do you also witness the REFORMATION OF THE MONOPOLIES?

Let’s look at the last chapter of the Anti-Trust Act for Dummies: “The Sherman Act is a Federal statute and as such has a scope limited by Constitutional constraints on the Federal government. The commerce clause, however, allows for a very wide interpretation and application of this act. The Act applies to all transactions and business involved in interstate commerce. If the activities are local, the act applies to transactions affecting interstate commerce. The latter phrase has been interpretted to allow broad application of the Sherman Act.”

That has to be the case, this interpretation to allow broad whatever.
From the pure dollars and cents side just consider the following:
Cingualar’s financial outcome:
2003 Net income: $1,022,0 (million)
1 year sales growth: 5.1% - (not a bad growth when you deal with many millions)
2003 sales: $15,483,0 (million of course)

OK, so they make a lot of money, so? So they give you the phones that can play endless games, download music, take pictures, look for weather displays, - BUT THEY DON’T GIVE YOU THE ONE FUNCTION THAT MATTERS – A USABLE GOOD OLD FASHIONED TELEPHONE.

It’s not very likely that I will need that phone in the outer Uzbekistan any time soon. But I would like to call my wife and kids from the airport the moment I land (that’s how I was trained). Oooops. “No signal” appears on my screen.

Now to make thins real bad (as if it they weren’t bad enough already), when you call their customer service with any (literally any complaint/question) you always (always) get the same answer.
“Sir, if you were to upgrade your service to the new GSM ZZLQ technology, you wouldn’t have so many dropped calls”. I accepted that and asked for a written guarantee. You guessed it – there was no written guarantee because of the “elements beyond our control”.

Their logo here is pretty accurate “Cingualr raising the bar”, sure they’re raising the bar of their earnings but the quality remains more poor than ever. I have many friends who bought into this new space age technology GSM ZZLQ and their problems are far worse than mine. After careful calculation I concluded that if my entire family is to switch our 4 cellular phones we’d spend about $800 on day one of the change alone. Not a bad idea if you’re a monopoly, get your existing clients to buy the product they already have, just because you made a prettier new product – while the service remains as bad as it ever was.

Iliya Pavlovich