I got my electric bill today. If your company is like mine, nearly every month, along with your bill, you get some kind of an offer of some other service.
Some are just radically off-the-wall -- my company offers, for an extra fifty or sixty dollars a year, a kind of insurance plan covering the eventuality that you might have to replace the sewer line between the house and the street. Let's see: sewers, electricity... electricity, sewers...no, it doesn't compute. Why would my electric utility be offering sewer repairs? And what may be next? Perhaps an offer to sell me my next new car, or discount prescriptions?
Another interesting one is the offer to supply only "green"-produced energy to your household - for an extra monthly fee, of course. I guess it's ok for the electric company to try to make a buck off people who are addled over alternative energy, but I have my suspicions. Energy is pretty fungible. How would I know if the electricity I get really comes from alternative sources?
The offers that really irk me, though, are two others that I commonly receive. One is for a big, expensive stand-alone backup generator (several thousand dollars) in the event of a lengthy power outage. These generators are noisy, ecologically unsound, inefficient (compared to centrally distributed power) but worst of all, they should be unnecessary if the power grid were as reliable as it used to be. (In response to an inquiry, the company said these are offered mostly for businesses, though that fails to explain why the offer is stuffed into residential bills.)
There's another in the same vein - for only five dollars a month, you can get a power surge protector installed that will protect all your appliances with motors (not computers) from getting zapped by a power spike.
(Note that this come-on also makes use of the concept that's so popular now, the monthly fee for a one-time service or product. Pay in perpetuity for a device that they'll come and install once and only once. What a rip-off! What would you think if the cable company tried "leasing" you its converter box instead of just putting it in as part of the service? What's that you say? They already DO? Oh yeah, I forgot.)
But back to the electric company. The common feature of the last two "offers" above is that the company can make profit from failing to perform the function we pay for: reliable electric power. Power failures and surges ought to be far less common than they are. I believe state regulators ought to forbid utility companies from offering services/devices that produce profit from poor performance. Otherwise, aren't we incentivizing them to do the wrong thing?