The Customers Talk Back

Public utility companies have prided themselves for years on their efficiency and their friendly relations with their customers. Now their erstwhile friends are furious over high rates or poor ser vice, and often over both at once. At least a dozen utilities from Pennsylvania to California have recently applied for permission to raise their charges. If granted, the increases could add nearly $400 million to U.S. gas and electric bills. Such moves normally stir up only routine opposition, but this year U.S. consumers are displaying an increasing choler over the cost and condition of all kinds of goods and services.

Nowhere have the sounds of outrage been heard more frequently than in New York City, where giant Consolidated Edison Co. has blamed conservationist opposition to its expansion plans for its difficulties in meeting growing demands for electric power (see ENVIRONMENT). Last week consumer wrath fell in almost equal measure on the New York Telephone Co., second largest in the Bell System. At a hearing called by the State Public Service Commission to investigate complaints of poor service, witnesses railed about everything from Manhattan's grossly overloaded Plaza 8 exchange to pay telephones in which the only working parts seem to be the coin slots. William Payson, president of the advertising firm of Avery, Hand & Co., said that two of his company's lines were apparently disconnected by mistake and were still not repaired after a month despite daily calls to telephone company offices. To call attention to its plight, his company bought $5,900 worth of space in the New York Times, offering a prize to whoever could guess "the exact date and time when New York Telephone reconnects our lines." Within hours the lines were restored, with apologies from a phone company vice president.

Hurt Pride. Computer experts also joined in the attack, charging that the system had failed to provide the service necessary to accommodate their industry's astonishing growth. Lewis Clapp, president of Dial-Data Inc., of Newton, Mass., predicted "national telephone blackouts" by 1972 unless the telephone companies take faster action to install the lines needed for transmission of a growing deluge of computerized data. Though his fears may be valid, Clapp's criticism is a bit un fair. The computer time-sharing industry has expanded much faster than even computer experts predicted, and it is still growing at a rate of more than 40% a year.

Telephone company officials readily admit that service has been poor, and blame many of their problems on the "unprecedented" growth in the tremendous demand for telephone service in the past 20 months. In an effort to over come deficiences, New York Telephone last month began bringing in an emergency force of 1,500 workmen from other parts of the U.S. "Our pride has been hurt," said William Sharwell, the company's vice president for operations. "We won't rest easy until service is good everywhere for everyone."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.