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Month 2006 Ethics Dunces
Consumers Energy Power Company
A bill's a bill. It's either paid or it's not paid. If one person gets away with not paying the whole amount, everyone will try to do it. A penny this time, a dollar the next, and where does it stop? And of course, a penny saved is a penny earned.
All wise and true. And despite all of these undoubtedly wise words, the Ethics Scoreboard is prepared to say that a utility that cuts off a woman's electricity because she owes one cent (that is $.01 dollars, or what is generally known as "next to nothing") is behaving unethically. ( And stupidly, but that is for the "Business Public Relations Scoreboard," if there is one.)
Consumers Energy in Flint, Michigan turned off a woman's power after she paid all but one penny of a $1,662.08 bill. The company told Jacqueline Williams it would not restore her power until it received the offending cent. After 7 hours, it restored her electricity after she paid the penny in person. Now perhaps the company had proof that Ms. Williams was engaging in a long term scheme, shaving one cent off all her bills until she had amassed an illegal fortune by her 2000th birthday. Or perhaps she always left a penny off her electric bill payments, and that $1,662.08 was accumulated in one cent increments. But absent these or some other diabolical motivations behind it, her one penny debt simply could not justify turning off her power. It could not be financially justified, because it costs much more than one cent to turn off and restore power. It costs more than one cent to call or write to tell her that the power is about to be cut off. The punishment does not fit the crime…and being one penny short is hardly a crime. Even the 7-11 down the street doesn't make a big deal about a missing penny.
The utility's conduct is wrong because it no more and no less than bullying, exerting superior and excessive force simply to cause someone pain and force them to admit weakness and defeat. If there were competing sources for electricity, a consumer treated like this would pay the lousy penny and then tell the company to take a hike: she would do business with one of the kinder, gentler, more reasonable electric companies, one that would simply add the missing penny to her next bill, perhaps, or forget it altogether as a gesture of good will. But Consumers Energy is a regulated monopoly; it has no competitors, and thus the company is obligated to show a little consideration, restraint, compassion and judgement in gratitude for its government-granted status, if not simply because it is the right thing to do.
One easy solution to the penny dilemma would be for the company to apply one of the undoubted thousands of pennies it has overcharged customers in the inevitable billing errors through the years…why, it might have even overcharged Mrs. Williams a cent or two! Of course, there was nothing she could do about that, and besides, what kind of dunce makes a big deal over one penny?
Oh…right. An Ethics Dunce.