America is ruled by monopolies now, and often one company is the only game in town nowadays. Utilities are different. Companies are far more abusive now. Workers are treated like disposable crap but with customers it's not much better. We are a captive audience who need necessities, and they don't care. Often there is no competitor to go to escape companies driving us crazy.
We used to be able to roll over one month's electric bill into the next. Now we can't. We can pay the electric bill mid-week but I already have been sent a disconnection notice. I have never gotten a disconnection notice in the last 20 years, even with the financial problems until last month and this month. Last month we obviously paid it in time. Two weeks late is now enough to get one. The next bill is due around Sept 2-5nd which means I got a collection notice for a bill that was due on August 4th on August 15th. [We paid this bill today]
It's more stress though. Do any of these companies wonder why everyone is broke and what it means for their future? Wouldn't they make more money if Americans had enough money to live on? I'm not an economist obviously but if you leave people without anything they aren't going to be buying your products.
Why don't companies care that no one has any money? Isn't there a certain point where no one will be able to afford their bills and they will all be out of business? Have you noticed corporations of all kinds don't seem to care about profits anymore as everyone goes broke? Is this because they are getting so much government money now they don't need us anymore? Take some time and look up how much money Elon Musk's companies got from the government. Maybe the ones for necessities are still making so much bank from abusing everyone they don't care, but isn't there an end point to all this?
Our leaders are crazed in that they don't care we don't have any money. I never have had the electric shut off for non-payment in my entire life, even during the Chicago era I paid them in time to avoid shut-offs. They mailed back my lifeline papers over some crazy quibble, lifeline is what people who are dependent on electrical medical devices to get their power outages dealt with quicker, or to prevent shut-offs. So I am not protected by that right now.
I could call my doctor to put a stop to a shut-off for a period of time for medical problems. Hey I make it my business to know these type of laws to survive. The times are shorter and shorter. That's their reaction, squeeze tighter as more people go broke. They are all psychotic. During the winter, I had one 500 dollar bill that gave me endless anxiety, but we were able to pay it.
We really don't have social services anymore. There are a few private and church programs out there, who help, but things are getting harder all over. They want American people stressed out and afraid, it gives the powers that be more control. This country is not free. We have a little freedom of speech left, but they'll stamp that out soon anyway. I'm surprised astrobots haven't shown up here to shout me down and tell me what a loser I am for not paying bills. X/Twitter was full of that crap.
Once when I got a 700 dollar electric bill one week, it wasn't in shut off yet, they didn't come after people like they do now, and I tried to go to charities to help me pay it and those people told me we needed a shut-off notice. I thought if I wait for a shut off notice, it will go off before I get any help. I was able to do a payment plan on top of the regular bills but it took me an entire year to pay it off. Keep in mind as you read this during the winter, I have to keep the temperature under 65.
An email company never leaves me alone, they always want me to pay for storage and threaten to shut the email off every other day. They fill my email box with junk mail even though I cancelled all email subscriptions and then the very next week there's more. It can take hours and hours to clean this crap out. I need this email to communicate with my doctors, get amazon locker codes from when I order vitamins, and other necessary stuff. I'm sick of it. Leave me alone!
Now I am dealing with this CPAP supply company, I don't want to give too many details, but the costs were quintupled, I was shocked by a big bill, that was multiple times more than the usual yearly bill, and I hadn't ordered more than the year before. The amount they charged insurance for some basic CPAP supplies made my hair stand on end. For weeks and weeks, I make negotiations with one of the higher ups on email. I promise to pay back the amount I owed, that still stood despite the insane cost increases, I stopped making orders except for filters which has brought me some hardships and life moves on. Monthly payments were made for some months and then suddenly paying on the portal doesn't work!
I have made all these negotiations in writing on email and thankfully kept the emails. The only reason this happened was telling them I was too deaf to use their phone line. I try to write the portal, they never help there. I decide to go pay the company in person at the local office, and the manager tells me "Oh we don't do that anymore!"
The manager mailed the address I needed to mail a check to. He was a nice guy, the system worked against him too! Computer people screwed up again! I should have been able to make payments on the computer portal but it didn't work! I was so overcharged. 500 dollars for a plastic CPAP mask is insane. For the cushions you change, they want something like 286 dollars. It is a small piece of plastic that is only 4-5 inches wide. I'm not ordering anything from them anymore but necessary filters.
Once when I got a 700 dollar electric bill one week, it wasn't in shut off yet, they didn't come after people like they do now, and I tried to go to charities to help me pay it and those people told me we needed a shut-off notice. I thought if I wait for a shut off notice, it will go off before I get any help. I was able to do a payment plan on top of the regular bills but it took me an entire year to pay it off. Keep in mind as you read this during the winter, I have to keep the temperature under 65.
An email company never leaves me alone, they always want me to pay for storage and threaten to shut the email off every other day. They fill my email box with junk mail even though I cancelled all email subscriptions and then the very next week there's more. It can take hours and hours to clean this crap out. I need this email to communicate with my doctors, get amazon locker codes from when I order vitamins, and other necessary stuff. I'm sick of it. Leave me alone!
Now I am dealing with this CPAP supply company, I don't want to give too many details, but the costs were quintupled, I was shocked by a big bill, that was multiple times more than the usual yearly bill, and I hadn't ordered more than the year before. The amount they charged insurance for some basic CPAP supplies made my hair stand on end. For weeks and weeks, I make negotiations with one of the higher ups on email. I promise to pay back the amount I owed, that still stood despite the insane cost increases, I stopped making orders except for filters which has brought me some hardships and life moves on. Monthly payments were made for some months and then suddenly paying on the portal doesn't work!
I have made all these negotiations in writing on email and thankfully kept the emails. The only reason this happened was telling them I was too deaf to use their phone line. I try to write the portal, they never help there. I decide to go pay the company in person at the local office, and the manager tells me "Oh we don't do that anymore!"
The manager mailed the address I needed to mail a check to. He was a nice guy, the system worked against him too! Computer people screwed up again! I should have been able to make payments on the computer portal but it didn't work! I was so overcharged. 500 dollars for a plastic CPAP mask is insane. For the cushions you change, they want something like 286 dollars. It is a small piece of plastic that is only 4-5 inches wide. I'm not ordering anything from them anymore but necessary filters.
It is a lot of stress as everything is getting old and worn out attached to my CPAP machine. I will have to use my mask until it falls apart. There's no way I can afford this stuff anymore. If insurance gets charged 500, remember I get charged 20 percent of that! Their bill was actually bigger then both my surgery bill and when I had a kidney infection in the ER. It went from 100 and something to 750 dollars!
They want me to use this phone system, that takes an hour and half to get a human on the line and none of those humans once you get them know English enough to solve any problems. Their accents are so thick my transcribe and my captioning phones do not work. My husband is on the line too, to help me, and he can't understand them either. They refuse to take my payment, because of the age of the bill, I spent months finding missing payments with these folks too, and despite my negotiations and promises by the higher up on the payment plan. I get nowhere. They refuse to take my money! Isn't this the definition of insanity?
The phone company is jumping the gun too on phone shut-offs, 2-3 weeks and the phone is dead too. He just paid it. Sometimes I rant and rave, they come after us so much, I swear they are double dipping us, and we are paying double! I need to have my husband sit down and write the dates and when we paid them.
AI is going to make things really bad. Computers don't care about special cases. Computers can't figure things out. Computers follow stupid rules from linear thinkers that program them and can't figure out that someone could have made negotiations on an old bill. Computers stick you in endless loops. Many of these companies have fired everyone to save money as AI takes jobs away and now you can never get a human. Many of these companies have no common sense and write rules that are stupid. I can't be the only person that owes this place money after they quintupled their prices. How could I be the only one? Why did I have to ask a local manager and took weeks to even dig up the address to mail a check to? Who forbid local offices to take payments? Are these people insane? I'm very good at internet research, and found the main headquarters, but the bill paying address is two states away. This company is TOO BIG.
They always make you feel like the only one in the world that this applies to. All business matters are much more difficult. I'll give the hospital this, at least their computer system works. People don't seem able to deal with complex things anymore. Sorry but the vaxx damage is showing. I'm seeing massive cognitive decline out there on multiple fronts. People are emotionally checked out at the least and unable to use critical thinking at the worse. The computer garbage has made everything harder, a lot of stuff is not user friendly.
What we seem to have now are too many simps and rule-followers who gave up all independent thinking and problem solving long ago. I am sure these people hate their jobs and feel desperate too, but there's some level of middle management that put the okay on these abuses, to make things as cheap and nasty as possible. There is no such thing as customer service anymore. Do places that have no competition as monopolies proliferate even need that anymore? Whoever is designing these computer systems are failing too. Some computer people may get mad at me for writing this, but there's problems with computer people they don't think holistically, and logic trees don't bring up the millions of other possibilities and complications that can happen. They don't acknowledge special cases or complications.
Are you seeing problems with companies and how they are operating now? Tell me your stories. I just want left alone at this point. Sometimes life feels like nothing but "run and pay". The medical bills are so numerous even keeping track of those is hard. At least next month, one will be paid off, until I get acutely sick again. The corporations own the government now, and they have so much power. Sometimes the bank account feels like handcuffs around my wrist with this orange bank card that controls my life. It's kind of creepy. Money is the prison cell the elite built to keep us all controlled. Everything is so crazy expensive too. The elite live swimming in money and you can tell they have no idea of what anyone actually lives on, so the higher-ups in these corporations simply have no idea. They don't care that their prices are so high, they have becoming impossible for most.
Are Companies Becoming Meaner and Greedier?
I agree these companies are getting far worse!
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