When money was tight, the wisdom in the neighborhoods I grew up in dictated that you made ends meet by paying a little bit here and little bit there to all the bill collectors who could cut something off, and everybody else was just going to have to wait until you came up with the cash.
Hurtful as that kind of juggling might have been to a credit rating, it was (and still is for a lot of people) a critical hard times survival skill. It kept you living on the edge, but there was a certain psychological safety net in knowing that even if the light man cut off your power, you could still cook a meal. Or if the gas man cut off the heat, you could still get a blanket and watch bootleg cable. And if the phone went dead in mid conversation, at least there was a phone booth on the corner.
Which makes it all the more curious that in many of those same neighborhoods where the bill-juggling gene is still passed on to new generations, the big telephone and cable companies have been incredibly successful in selling service “bundles,” those discount packages offering cable, high-speed Internet and digital voice telephone service in one convenient (if you don’t count the wait for installation) and less expensive box.
It’s not an evil plot on the part of the telecom industry. Business is business, and now that deregulation has allowed everyone to play in everyone else’s yard, multiple points of service is their version of survival, but with a lot more zeros behind it. It’s also very smart marketing. Unlimited long distance, 100-plus channels of television and faster music downloads for a flat fee is an attractive and smart deal no matter how you slice it. Even if you go for the full gazillion channel cable package, the media Happy Meal still comes out less than a normal household will pay each month in separate cable, broadband and long distance bills. Sometimes dramatically less.
And there’s been a great side benefit. The dramatic increase in African American adoption of broadband is in no small part due to the relative no-brainer combo of digital cable and a cable modem. Millions of ad and marketing dollars are now being shifted to meet the demand fueled by that increase. That’s a wonderful thing.
It’s the addition of telephone service to that bundle that should be a cause for, if not worry, then caution on the part of some consumers.
There’s no real inherent danger in bundling your communications services. Though in a post-911, post-Katrina world, having a telephone connected to the electrical outlet makes me squeamish, even with the promise of eight hours of emergency battery power.
If you’re the family with separate cell phones for home and work, TIVO, the full sports package on Direct TV, the Viking professional range and HDTV, you’ll be fine with the bundle. If worse comes to worse and a lightning bolt strikes out the power on all your toys, you can still drive your SUV to safety and probably catch the end of your favorite show.
But who should think twice about bundling all their critical communications services under one corporate umbrella? All those folks (and there are many) who live check to check. And we’re not just talking the less well-off here. There are the millions of creatives and home-based consultants who get paid lumps when clients feel like paying. And there are even greater numbers of families teetering on the line of broke if an unexpected medical bill or family emergency should arise.
Life gets weird when money is tight, and somehow the day your phone gets cuts off is always the day you were supposed to hear back from that new employer.
The future of what can happen became clear recently when I moved to a new city and needed to drop off my cable boxes to the company’s service and payment center. The service line was clear, but the payment line was out the door – very similar to the lines I used to stand in at the phone company when I was young and broke. The people in line then and now? 95% African American. Certainly people were not inconveniencing themselves that much to watch the final Sopranos episode. It was the loss of phone and Web service driving the line that day.
If this sounds at all familiar, I’m not saying don’t do the bundle. Just that you might want to consider at least a cellphone in addition. And if you’re extra cautious, a free Web-based e-mail account that can be checked from a neighbor’s home, work or a library.
Financial experts will call this awful advice. They will say that saving money is most key for those struggling from paycheck to paycheck. But the former poor kid in me says that in an information age, the first rung to a better financial life is unfettered and uninterrupted access to information, not fifty extra dollars.
Information is a utility now, just like the gas man and the ‘lectric man. But for the grace of God (and some education and information), I haven’t chased a repo guy for quite a while. But for my money, there’s a certain psychological safety in knowing that when the phone gets cuts off, you can still send an e-mail and do that job search. And for a lot of people, separating the phone from the bundle is probably a more reliable choice.
(Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company. He writes on media, tech and politics for ebonyjet.com.)
