Where Customer Service was just a passing fad

[msmercenary]

I had occasion to visit the local Comcast store today to drop off some equipment, though I didn't know at the time that I'd be treated to some drama. I pulled into the parking lot of the Redmond store about ten minutes to noon under a partly-cloudy, but still warm and sunny sky. The lobby as I walked in contained four people

Comments

[reaverta]

Welcome to the joys of Telecom NZ (Our monopoly phone company), the five geographically-divided private power companies (Effectively, our power monopoly), and our monopolistic privatised rail-roads... except that the rail-roads realised they weren't a monopoly, because everyone just switched to cars and trucks, and they went bankrupt.

...The sad thing is that the pro-privatisation right wing party is liable to get in this election. I'm wondering what they'll sell next.

[msmercenary]

You've missed my point if you think that a privately-managed monopoly is any different from a government-managed monopoly. Neither has the incentive for efficiency that competition brings. The solution to a government monopoly is not privatization, because as you point out, that just produces a private monopoly. The solution is to introduce competition.

Unfortunately, this solution is extremely difficult in the case of utility companies who have a huge amount of infrastructure to maintain. You almost have to provide a monopoly of some type on last-mile connections, in order to keep from knocking over the poles under the weight of 100 different cables.

[reaverta]

Yeah, I wasn't trying to make a point about one being better than the other. My gripe was a fellow one, where a monopoly at all is a flawed design.

Unfortunately in NZ, we seem to have better odds of shouting at politicians to make a state-owned company behave itself than we do a foreign investor running the thing as a for-profit organisation - at the cost of, y'know, letting politicians meddle in a buisness, which is all bad in its own special ways.

...But my main point is that practically every vital service here is a monopoly due to sheer lack of size. Four million people will do that to you though, I guess.