Monday, January 11, 2010
'Customer charge' is cost of doing business
Tom Angleberger
The New River Valley-based reporter answers your questions Mondays in his column, What's on Your Mind?
Recent columns
Q: What is the $12 monthly charge on my gas bill every month, simply labeled "customer charge"?
-- Dorothy Leonard, Roanoke
A: "This is one of the most common questions we get from customers and probably one of the most common questions any utility gets from its customers," answered Dale Lee, vice president and corporate secretary of RGC Resources, the parent company of Roanoke Gas.
"The charge is the same for all residential customers," Lee told me. "There is no way to avoid the charge and remain connected to our system."
Lee explained that whether you buy a tiny bit of gas or a lot, the company still faces certain fixed costs in supplying you with gas.
"Meter reading, meters, pipes and other connections from the meter to our system, 24 hours monitoring of service, customer call center, etc. ... are all costs that have to be incurred by the utility regardless of how much gas a customer uses."
Now there is another way that the gas company could pay for all this.
They could simply have a flat rate with no extra charges, but of course that flat rate would have to be higher than the one they have now. Everyone would pay more per unit of gas, especially the heaviest users. These heavy users would, in effect, be subsidizing small users.
You'll have to decide for yourself which way is most fair.
On a similar subject, I received some interesting replies to last week's question about the sizes of grocery store products quietly getting smaller.
Betsy Day of Roanoke pointed out that there's another product with changing sizes.
"I find the smaller packages very frustrating when I'm cooking," she told me. Say a recipe calls for 12 ounces of condensed milk.
"Goody -- the new can holds only 10 ounces. What to do? Just add the lesser amount and pray? Buy two cans? What a wonderful idea! Everybody who makes money from it loves it. I DON'T!"
And Virgil Cook, our esteemed Grammar Guru, wrote in from Blacksburg to tell me that the practice is anything but new.
"Between 1924 and 1927, my parents ran a grocery store in Princeton, W.Va. Remember that most items were measured when you bought them. The district office instructed my dad to measure out a pound at 15 ounces. That's when he resigned and moved back to Roanoke."
Speaking of grammar
As long as we've got the Grammar Guru handy, let's put him back to work. After a long holiday hiatus, he's ready to help us help ourselves again. This time I asked him if President Obama needed a little help.
You may recall that when we held a poll last year to find the number one grammar pet peeve, one of the top vote-getters was "I." No, not me personally, I mean using the word "I" instead of "me." Example: "He corrected Bill and I." That's wrong, and it drives people up the wall.
So imagine my shock when President Obama gave his Nobel acceptance speech and said:
"I cannot argue with those who find these men and women ... to be far more deserving of this honor than I."
Relax! Obama had it right. Cook assured me that in this case it's OK to end a sentence with "I," because there's an implied "am." He might have said "than I am," which would have been correct, too.
Got a question? Got an answer? Call Tom Angleberger at 777-6476 or send an e-mail to woym@roanoke.com. Don't forget to provide your full name, its proper spelling and your hometown.
