Just One More Little Thing. . .
They’re such little things, really.
Just a teensy 3-digit area code tacked onto your phone number.
Just 21 extra pennies for 411 on your telephone bill.
Just a buck-fifty on your bank statement--six bits, for Pete’s sake! You’re so cheap, you want freebies at another guy’s ATM?
Just a wee smidge of pressure on your family doctor from an HMO.
Just a nudge in the price of gas, of what? A few coins?
Just a few personal factoids that your bank can now share with other companies. Like your life is so interesting that you’ve got anything to hide.
Just a couple of ads on a Web site--since when can’t you ignore a commercial?
Just some advantage for Microsoft that normal people don’t understand anyway.
Just a tiny piece of plastic for your high school senior. Hey, kids need money, and there’s nothing like a 21% interest rate to teach ‘em there’s no free lunch.
Just four hours on an airplane, with people beside you and--that’s right--a snack now instead of a meal. What, you don’t like people? And as for lunch, well, couldn’t we all stand to lose a pound or two?
It’s so little. Is it really too much to ask in this, the best of times? And yet, laid out like that, you can’t help but notice--those little things sure do add up.
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It’s tempting to sneer at the spate of consumer backlashes that have popped up, like so many brush fires, in California this year. Rich Westsiders rejoicing because--No Justice! No Peace!--they beat back 11-digit dialing. Huffy liberals in San Francisco and Santa Monica battling itty-bitty ATM fees.
Not to mention the anti-electricity-deregulation movement. Or the big “Gas Out” a few months back over the price of petroleum. They seem to come every few weeks now, these little dust-ups, the latest involving a hike by the state Public Utilities Commission in the fee for directory assistance calls.
It’s tempting to dismiss these crusades as one more set of distractions for the masses. Or as a laughable token gesture. If you can’t slay the dragon, then stomp on his pinky toe. And these are big dragons: corporate mergers, deregulated monopolies, global competition, technology--pretty intimidating stuff for most folks.
But gestures here have a way of broadening. This is California, where people make national trends out of little things. And bit by bit, workaday consumers here seem to be getting their nerve up. Maybe not to the point that bus drivers are slinging advanced economic theory, but certainly to the point where their consumer advocates have stopped talking down to the public. Take, for example, this:
“What’s happening in a nutshell is, policymakers have taken big steps to deregulate industries, and in the process, haven’t taken care of consumers. And at the same time, there has been this merger mania. It’s classic economics. If you rely on competition that isn’t there, monopolies will extract monopoly rents.”
That’s Nettie Hoge talking, executive director of the Utility Rate Network, the consumer group that’s fighting the hike in 411 fees. She thinks this year’s dust-ups are “the tip of the iceberg.” So did the elevator service technician who had this to say to the Associated Press, regarding Pacific Bell’s doubling last week of 411 prices:
“The common Joe does not get that kind of percentage in wage increases. Why should these big conglomerates get it? They’re not giving us any better service.” As he spoke, some 42,000 callers, e-mailers and letter-writers just like him were being ignored--at its own peril--by the PUC.
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“At its own peril” because the other interesting thing about these little uprisings is that they’re starting to tip the balance--they’re starting to count. There are a lotta Common Joes out there in the voting public, who make a lotta noise when they get mad enough and get their acts together. The 310 area code thing, which touched as many fixed-income voters as well-off ones, ended up turning Assemblyman Wally Knox into a political hero and changing state law.
President Bill Clinton’s advisors weren’t kidding back when they cynically steered him toward the big political mileage you can get by homing in on peoples’ everyday issues--taking care of their aging parents, squeezing one night’s stay in the maternity ward out of the HMO. “Is anybody listening in Sacramento?” a Times reader wrote in a recent letter on the ATM fees. I’d assume so. Those little things--they have a way of getting to you.
Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.
