Contracts, Contracts, Everywhere

ByHeather

Long term contracts and petty fees are everwhere.

When we moved to Princeton last year we signed up for Poland Springs water delivery. (Poland Springs is owned by that bottled water juggernaut, Nestle Waters.) They offered an inflexible monthly service plan of 4 bottles per month for $32.96, which was the best deal in their array of undesirable options. You can skip a delivery, but not a payment.

When the first bill arrived I was surprised to find a $2.00 fee for an Oil Surcharge. What? This is nothing more than a price hike disguised as a fee, hiding behind rising fuel prices. They are in the delivery business. Fuel charges are integral to their cost of doing business and should therefore be integrated into the price.

My biggest disappointment came when I set out to cancel the service due to a pending move to North Carolina. I knew I had signed a contract for their flat rate service but I remembered it as being a one year commitment. Imagine my surprise to discover that I had, in fact, signed a two-year contract and was now facing a $50 cancellation fee. With our move date rapidly approaching, I paid the fee . . . and said goodbye to Nestle Waters.

The cell phone industry introduced us to contracts with the rationalization that they were subsidizing the price of the phone. Our “commitment” helped them ensure that they recovered the cost of the phone. Now that we let them in the door, the industry is charging contracts everywhere. AT&T requires a two year contract with the iPhone despite the fact that there is no subsidy for the hardware. T-Mobile required a one-year contract extensions just to upgrade my handset to a Blackberry. No thank you.

Contracts have a modicum of acceptability if the company incurs set-up costs, such as when the cable guy has to come out to your house to set up your cable box. But Poland Springs had no startup costs with my service plan. They delivered four bottles of water to my house once a month for a cost of $8.74 a bottle (or $1.75 / gallon). The entire delivery too mere minutes each month. It seems to me that they should be able to make a profit on each delivery, beginning with the first one.

I guess I have learned my lesson with bottled water. There has been a lot of buzz in the news lately about the potential hazards of plastic bottles leaching their chemicals into their contents. (Check out the great Smart Plastics Guide at the The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy). Time to get a water filter.

Similar Posts

  • Soaring to the Highest Heights

    ByHeather

    . . . those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths, and the natures which suffer most sharply are those which also enjoy most keenly.

    — Lucy Maud Montgomery, Ann of the Island

    I grew up in a home where showing emotions was not encouraged. As I set out on my own I was proud of my ability to maintain an even keel. But as time wore on I came to realize that holding my emotions in check was just a cloak for numbness. A dear friend offered me this quote and I was suddenly free.

    In order to soar to emotional heights I had to allow myself the possibility of plunging to the deepest depths. Goodbye even keel. I learned to embrace the lows and reveled in the highs. Sometimes you have to live with the rain. But when the sun eventually comes out — and it always does — the warmth and the light are more glorious than ever.

  • Growth

    ByHeather

    Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

    — Edward Abbey

    Perhaps it is my natural temperament to do things deliberately and with purpose (after all, it is the tortoise who wins the race). Maybe it is my persistent skepticism. Quite possibly it is an outgrowth of my intuitive personality type (INTJ). Whatever the reason, I have always been resistant to Wall Street’s incessant demand for growth from public companies.

  • On the Financial Meltdown

    ByHeather

    As they say on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, “and now for some quotes from this week’s news.”

    First, a delightful blog I discovered called The Big Picture by Barry L. Ritholtz. In a post titled The Underlying Basis of Finance and Credit, Mr Ritholtz observes:

    Over the entire history of human finance, the underlying premise of all credit transactions — loans, mortgages, and all debt instrument — has been the borrower’s ability to repay.

    Except for [the 5 year period from 2002 to 2007] the entire history of human finance was rather reasonable about the basis for making loans in general, and extending mortgage loans in particular.

    For 99.9996% of the last 1.2 million years, loans were granted primarily on the condition of whether or not the lender believed that the borrower could repay. Between 2002 and 2007 this condition was dropped.

  • Steinbeck on Writing

    ByHeather

    I think there is only one book to a man. It is true that a man may change or be so warped that he becomes another man and has another book but I do not think that it is so with me.

    — John Steinbeck, Journals of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

    East of Eden was the first book that I read by Steinbeck. It was moving and well written and rich with characters. Then I discovered Journals of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters and suddenly I felt I had been given a back stage pass to the mind of a writer.

    Steinbeck had already written Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) when he set out to write East of Eden (1951). In the intervening years he lived through two divorces and served as a war correspondent. Despite the critical success of his earlier works, his standing as a major novelist had faded. As today’s quote reveals, Steinbeck also felt that he had not yet told the one story that was within him. His editor, Pascal Covici, did all that he could to encourage Steinbeck. Covici sent Steinbeck a number of notebooks and instructed Steinbeck to use them to write.

  • Trees

    ByHeather

    Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man’s life only saplings can be grown, in the place of old trees – tens of centuries old – that have been destroyed.

    — John Muir

    Like many in my generation, I devoured J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings with great relish. The metaphors, archetypes and stories from the rich world of Middle Earth continue to resonate through my mind many years after my last reading. One of my favorite creations is the sentient, intelligent, and wise race of Ents. These humanoid trees spoke too slowly and at a frequency too low for humans to perceive. They moved through the forest at a pace too slow to be perceptible.

    Some years ago I hiked with a friend to a sacred Native American burial ground in the mountains of Northwest New Mexico…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.