If you’re playing Monopoly, it’s always a good thing to gobble up the utilities. Those suckers add up. But in real life, they suck. Let me give you my reason why in the form of a scenario:
1. Aspiring, young, handsome man buys a house in August of 2005 and goes about the normal business of setting up electricity service to his new home.
2. The electric company, PECO, informs the aspiring, young, handsome man that he will be forced to pay a deposit on his account in the total of $150 because he is a perceived credit risk. Following 1 year of timely payments, the deposit will be credited to his account.
3. Given the fact that the aspiring, young, handsome man has never paid a bill late in his life, has zero credit card debt, and an overall credit score in the mid 700’s, aspiring, young, handsome man understandably protests said deposit.
4. Electric company informs aspiring, young handsome, man that many times during the process of purchasing a house, one’s credit score decreases because of the number of credit checks run against him in a short period of time. Evidently, when a credit check is run on a person, that person’s credit score almost automatically decreases with each check.
5. Pissed off, aspiring, young, handsome man decides to just bite the bullet and pay the stupid deposit to avoid further argument with idiotic utility company.
6. One year hence, aspiring, young, handsome man receives his electric bill as usual after 1 year of timely payments and does not see his deposit credited to his account.
7. Aspiring, young, handsome man places an agitated phone call to utility company to demand the whereabouts of his deposit. Almost expecting the call, customer service representative interrupts the story and asks, “I bet you want your deposit back, don’t you?”
8. After an emphatic “YES!”, aspiring, young, handsome man wonders if said utility company would have ever volunteered the return of the deposit, or just “let sleeping dogs lie” hoping that a less than astute customer would forget about it.
This begs the question: how much money does PECO bilk out of its underpriviledged customers every year? Generally the type of people that are “perceived credit risks” aren’t the type of people that categorize every expense they have down to the minutest of details (just ask CMB). In my mind, the type of people they’re charging these deposits aren’t going to remember they were paid over a year later and demand them back. What a bunch of slimeballs at PECO.
Technorati Tags: utility company, power, electric, bills, credit risk
