We are a nation of Skimmers

Have you received the phone call, "Could I please speak with whoever is in charge of the gas bill?" If you don't live in Ohio, or one of the 13 other deregulated states, you may have no idea what I'm talking about. But for the past few years, I get several phone calls and letters from a variety of companies claiming to "want" to save me money. What? When pressed, the person calling really can't explain how they are going to save me money on my gas bill, or why they would even do such a thing, why I need to sign up with them to "receive" my gas for 12 months when the price will still be variable. It's called "choice," but so far, the only choice I can find is to pay more.

After speaking with the training manager on duty, looking up this and several other companies on the internet and speaking to my father (who knows all), we figured out that there is no savings. Every company that is offering this program is starting you higher than what the open rate is right now. If you don't ever look at your bill, you don't know that. Obviously, if the gas company is giving you a locked rate, it would make sense for it to be higher because they don't know what the future is going to bring. It's a gamble for both customer and supplier because no one knows what will happen. But these folks who want to continually sell you gas .5ccf's higher than current market price and then tell you it's a savings, that's just some folks exploiting a piece of legislation. These companies are not moving gas into the pipeline, they did not purchase gas and are holding it for me (though they will tell you that). They are trading commodities or futures at a specific price and then skimming what they can off the top.

It's genious really. They are employing people to make this happen. They are paying people to make phone calls to customers to convince them to switch. Many of these companies are sending people out to talk to businesses, they send letters through the mail and waste millions of tons of paper and diesel doing so. I'm in awe at the vast resources we are wasting to make money out of nothing. But that's capitalism. I'm not complaining about the system--this is just not the type of business we need to be engaging in. These folks are genious. But why can't they create a real product to sell? Something that enriches peoples lives?

If we really want a strong country, we must begin creating things and producing them again. We cannot continue down the path of unsustainable skimming. And we can only handle so many service jobs as well. We need to make tangible products that people here and around the world find useful.