July 2010

Monday 26 July - Why everyone hates Rogers

Well, there are tons of reasons, but today I came up with another example.

In this month's bill for my cable TV, there's a note saying that at the start of September they'll be dropping one of my favourite channels, National Geographic HD, from the programming package it's currently in (along with making a couple of other changes that don't concern me), and that I should go to a specific URL on the Rogers Web site or call their customer service for information on how to continue receiving this channel. The Web site has no such information; in fact, it still lists National Geographic HD as one of the channels in that package (which is true at the moment) and makes no mention of its upcoming removal from that package. It also doesn't mention how to buy an individual channel, or even if that's possible.

So I called customer service. The guy knew nothing about it, so he put me on hold for a few minutes, only to come back and say that they didn't have any information beyond what's in the bill, but he thought that customers who currently have this package would continue to receive this channel for free for a little while after they drop it. He said that the cable customer service department would know more (their IVR menu lumps cable together with Internet and something else so I guess I got a generic customer service department for anything that connects to their cable network), so he transferred me.

The lady in the cable customer service department knew that this change was coming but didn't know anything more than that, so she put me on hold for several minutes. When she came back, she said they had no information beyond that, and that I'd either have to call customer service (and I explained that "customer service" was the department that had forwarded me to her in the first place) or call back next month.

And then Rogers wonders why people say they suck?

Thursday 22 July - New York Law

When I was at my mom's house for dinner this evening, she showed me a letter she had received from a laywer in Poughkeepsie, New York. This lawyer is handling the estate of a relative of mine on my dad's side. The letter explained that, under New York law, he has to contact a wide range of relatives, even though they are not mentioned in the will, and while he had contact information for my mother (who is not involved, as her only relation to the deceased is that she married a relative of his), he didn't have information for me or for my brother (who are involved, as there is a blood relationship). The purpose of his letter, then, was to obtain addresses for us.

The wacky part is how distant the relationship is. I don't believe I ever met this relative, and while I recognize his surname as a common one on my dad's side, I couldn't even tell you what cousin number and/or how many times removed we are from each other without sitting down with a family tree and the Wikipedia page on cousins. And yet, despite this and the two of us not being mentioned in the will, his estate has to pay for the lawyer to track us down and send us paperwork (and, of course, to do the same with who knows how many other distant relatives in at least three countries).

Tuesday 20 July - Eco Fees

There's been a big uproar in Ontario over eco fees since the start of the month. Unfortunately, as so often happens with things related to government and taxpayers' money, the uproar has not served the public very well.

Some background first. Stewardship Ontario is an agency that was created several years ago to oversee recycling. It runs at arms length from the government, and the industries whose products are recycled play a significant role in its operations. Initially, it was funded by companies that sell products that end up in your blue box. It's part of a variety of organizations involved in various aspects of waste reduction and recycling in Ontario; another one of those organizations, for instance, collects fees on a variety of electronic items such as TVs and DVD players to cover the cost of responsible disposal once they reach the end of their lives. Stewardship Ontario, too, has been collecting eco fees for the last couple of years, though only on a very limited range of items including paint, single-use (non-rechargeable) batteries, and motor oil.

Stewardship Ontario and its fees pretty much flew beneath the radar until early this month, when all of a sudden people buying a whole range of products (including greener choices like rechargeable batteries and compact fluorescent lights) discovered that they were being charged eco fees on those products. The fees were inconsistent between products, between retail chains, and even in some cases between stores in the same retail chain. Some of the fees seemed ridiculously high. And this was a massive surprise to everyone because, in an incredible display of stupidity, Stewardship Ontario decided that it would be best not to publicize the expansion of their eco fee program until after it came into effect, leaving the public completely in the dark. To make matters worse, these new fees started on the same day that the HST jacked up the prices of about one-sixth of the items an average consumer buys.

The government announced today that it's putting the eco fees on hold for three months while it figures out a better way. Meanwhile, the money required to run the recycling program is going to be contributed from the government's coffers (i.e. it's still coming out of our pockets, except that we no longer get an itemized bill for it).

The basic idea of the eco fee is a good one: make the cost of responsible disposal of an item part of the price of buying it. This funds the program which will recycle as much of the item as possible, and responsibly dispose of the rest, at the end of its service life, instead of just dumping it in the landfill. Collecting the disposal cost at the time of sale also means that the consumer doesn't have an incentive to just toss it in the garbage later (which would be the case if you had to pay to drop it off at a waste transfer facility, for instance; that would cause most consumers to find a way to stuff it in their trash). So the worst thing the government could do is to scrap this system entirely, as one party is proposing.

How should the fee be collected? That's a bit of a problem. Should it be rolled into the price of a product, or a separate fee at time of purchase? The first one, I think, is what's likely to happen; bury it where consumers can't see it, and they won't complain so much. (After all, even though the GST is a better tax in almost every way than the manufacturer's tax it replaced, people hate the GST because it looked like a new tax: the old one was buried in the price of the item, out of sight and out of mind.) The second one is perhaps better, in that it educates the consumer that disposal costs money. Still, as long as the cost of disposal is collected in some fashion, we should be OK.

Some of the items had ridiculous fees. As someone pointed out, how is he supposed to dispose of his lawn fertilizer once he's used it to fertilize his lawn? There were also different fees for products which the consumer might see as equivalent; for instance, the fee for bleach (another example of a product which is used, not disposed of) varied depending on its pH level - which the average consumer doesn't know and isn't even printed on the label of the product. The fees need to make sense.

And the next time the list of products subject to these fees is expanded, hopefully someone will have learnt a lesson: educate the public before the system goes into effect.

Let's hope that the government hasn't been stung so badly by how poorly this was handled that it does something stupid.