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Health & Fitness

What's Wrong With This Picture?

What happens when you try to unbundle the bundle?

Suppose you went into a nice restaurant and ordered the lamb chops (slightly rare) resting on a dollop of garlic mashed potatoes,  topped with a delicate filligree of salty, baked, crispy green chard, with a red wine reduction embracing this small mound of food served on a white plate as large as your bathroom sink. And after taking your order the waiter informed you that the restaurant was "bundling" its dinner offerings and you would have to accept an unappetizing hunk of overcooked beef liver along with the selection you really wanted if you wanted to get the best price for a meal at this eatery.

"Wait a minute, " you cry.  "I don't want the liver. I don't like liver"

"Well then," the waiter advises, " I'll have to charge you more for the chops and potatoes. The best deal is to take the triple bundle of chops, potatoes and liver."

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This is analagous to the fruitless discussion I have repeatedly had with my communications provider. I have phone, internet, and TV bundled together. But I don't watch TV.  The few things I might want to watch I can catch some other way via my computer.  So I would like to drop the TV and keep the phone and internet. Well, not so easy. For if I drop the TV, and go to only two services, the price for those two services goes up, and is very close to what I am already paying for three services.

I hate paying for something I am not using, and in fact, don't want. It doesn't seem fair.  Never mind that your TV service should really be "a la carte,"  where you just pay for the networks you actually want to watch. But I'd like a bigger break in my monthly bill for dropping the TV altogether.

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I guess the business model of bundling is an entrenched concept. Kind of like when the supermarket wraps up three green peppers in a package, and one of those peppers is already smushed on the bottom, but you can't see that. So the store gets rid of something they would otherwise have had to throw away, and you get 2 1/2 green peppers that are usable, but you paid for three.

I guess I should just go ahead and drop the TV, even though I would only save a few bucks each month. At the end of a year I would have saved enough money so that  I could go out to a nice restaurant and order some lamb chops.

 

 

 

 

 

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