Start Me Up
The reason I have posted only two quite short articles this week is that my internet router has gone AWOL, and Start.ca informs me that they will not get a new one to me until next week some time. Doing anything on the web, including posting articles here, requires me to go to my gal’s house. A pleasant prospect, but somewhat limiting.
The tale of my being in this situation is worth telling, beyond any excuse for my failing to post. It’s a lesson in 21st century capitalism.
I became a subscriber to Start.ca when it was a new startup here in London, Ontario. I had been a customer of Bell Mobility for years, and was getting sick of the shitty quality of their internet and their pathetic customer relations department. So, I canceled Bell, started with Start, and was instantly delighted. The quality of the internet itself was indeed much higher, but even better was the customer service.
I rarely had a problem, but when I did, I called a number with a local area code, and my call was answered with little delay by somebody who spoke clear English. They were helpful to a fault.
Some years after I became a Start customer, this very successful local company was bought out by Telus, the national telecommunications company, who coincidentally provides me with my dumbphone service.
I have nothing good to say about Telus, and so I instantly saw trouble on the horizon regarding my Start service.
It took a few years for Telus to fuck Start up, but as of this morning, they have officially arrived at that position. Royally.
I called the 866 number for Start this morning when I realized the reason I could not reboot my internet connection was that my router was simply dead. No lights, no nothing. The recorded voice on the other end, after giving me a pep talk on how awesome Start is, said:
‘We detect that the phone number you are calling from is connected with one of our services. Is this the service about which you are calling?’
I was calling from my cell, so I knew this referred to my cell account with Telus. I hit 2 for ‘No’.
The voice then said ‘Enter the telephone number for the service you are calling about.’
I entered my home phone number, which is now a VOIP line carried by Start, and heard yet again;
‘We detect that the phone number you are calling from is connected with one of our services. Is this the service about which you are calling?’
I said some bad words and hung up. Poured myself another cup of coffee.
Feeling my blood pressure drop sufficiently halfway through that second cup, I called again, listened to the pep talks again, and simply waited, doing and saying nothing, while the voice said repeatedly, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.’
Eventually it said it was switching me to an agent. Ah.
After punching my way through a menu I was advised to ‘stay on the line to maintain your place in sequence.’
Music played, and from time to time I was told I was listening to Sting Ray Music. It was dreadful.
Now and then I would hear a helpful hint like ‘try turning your equipment off and back on’ and my favourite: ‘Did you know you can go to www.start.ca for helpful troubleshooting hints?’
Assholes. Why do you think I am in this phone queue?
It took I would guess 10 minutes to get a person on the line, which is not so long by modern standards. To my surprise the human spoke impeccable English. I told him what was going on, and after listening to his advice to ‘unplug it and plug it back in’ [did that twice] and to check the electrical outlet [did that too] he said they would send me a new router. Not that I could go somewhere local and pick one up, as would have been the case back before the takeover. I would just have to wait for delivery. Next week.
At the end I told the person to tell their boss that I would be looking for a new internet service provider, now that they had destroyed the best feature of the company they took over. He said he would. Perhaps he will, but I have no illusions it will matter in any way. Nor do I expect that I will actually be able to find an ISP that does not provide so-called customer service in the same shitty manner.
I have written about these matters before, it is the part of economics that I tried to teach students about for much of my career, an area of economics that actually matters to people’s daily lives – competition policy.
Telus should never have been allowed to buy Start. Loblaws should never have been allowed to buy Shoppers Drug Mart, nor should Sobie’s and Farmboy have been allowed to merge. Tangerine should not be owned by Bank of Nova Scotia or TD or whoever the hell bought it when it was called Ing.
I know the criteria by which the Competition Bureau in Canada and the FTC in the US judge these mergers and takeovers, and those criteria entirely miss the point of having competition policy. The only force that keeps firms from treating buyers as nothing more than profit sources is competition. These mergers eliminate competition, because competition on a day-to-day basis for people is about one thing only – do you have choices?
Mergers always reduce choice, and hence are inherently anti-competitive, no matter how much bilge about efficiencies and synergies and scale economies the corporate lawyers pump out.
I will indeed look for a new ISP once my Start internet is back up and working – is that ironic or what? But I am not hopeful of doing better.