Zobel said:
You're basically saying you, or maybe the average person, is incapable of making a rational decision about an electric bill. I don't agree.
Pricing isn't complex. There's a electricity facts label. It tells you how much you pay per kWhr. You don't need to know how the grid works to read that. Whatever your rate for that month is times how many kWhr you use is what you pay.
If you can't figure that out, you also can't understand how rent, or a mortgage, or a car payment, or a cell phone subscription works. I really don't know what to tell you.
Again, ignorance is expensive. At some point people have to accept responsibility. No one signs a contract for you. If you don't understand what you're signing, don't sign. If you sign anyway, and it doesn't go well, that isn't "bad customer service."
As stated, your explanation is oversimplified. It's easy to plan and calculate kWhr*price when price is known, but it's
something else entirely to plan when it isn't known and price is variable, which is what is at issue here. At that point you're getting into price distributions and probability to estimate min and max price based on historical variance. Even if you fully understood how to do that, prices were so abnormal that they'd likely push you well outside even a 99% confidence interval, which would already be huge. Simple heuristics, how pretty much everyone estimates, is going to tell you that the kWhr price on a variable rate plan is never going to be in the hundreds of dollars per kWhr. Until it is.
What the average person doesn't understand is how the electricity market works and just how variable a variable rate plan can be because it's wholesale. When the typical kWhr price is something $0.10, the average consumer isn't going to consider that that cost could ever go to $10 or $100 a kWhr because it's so far beyond what is normal. It's like saying you're an idiot for getting a variable rate mortgage if your interest rate goes from 3.5% to 35,000% overnight. Unless they know the market and the price variability, the average person isn't going to ever consider this possibility and a variable rate plan looks more attractive and less risky than it actually is.
As for the last paragraph, it's pure condescension because you know the arena. I'm sure you have signed away all kinds of consent in software agreements and EULAs where you can't even fathom the impact because you don't understand the possibilities or the language used. It IS bad customer service to not fully and
plainly inform customers of exactly what they're agreeing to and it's possible implications. If people were told that the kWhr price on their variable rate plan could go from cents to the hundreds or thousands of dollars in an emergency and they could have a five figure monthly bill, I'm sure many or even most of them would not have agreed to it.