The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use Plain English to Rob You Blind Read online

  THE FINE

  PRINT

  Also by David Cay Johnston

  Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at

  Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)

  Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to

  Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else

  [the fine print]

  THE FINE

  THE FINE PRINT

  PRINT

  HOW BIG COMPANIES USE “PLAIN ENGLISH”

  TO ROB YOU BLIND

  DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

  PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

  PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © David Cay Johnston, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Johnston, David.

  The fine print : how big companies use “plain English” to rob you blind / David Cay Johnston.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-47630-7

  1. Invoices. 2. Corporations—Corrupt practices. I. Title.

  HF5681.I7J64 2012

  364.16’8—dc23 2012019318

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Janson Text LT Std

  Designed by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any reponsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For David Crook

  [ CONTENTS ]

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  1. Jacking Up Prices

  2. Corporate Power Unlimited

  3. Buffett Buys a Railroad

  4. Railroaded

  5. In Twenty-ninth Place and Fading Fast

  6. Profits Upkeep Commissions

  7. “We Lead the Industry with Integrity”

  8. Paying Other People’s Taxes

  9. Investors Beware

  10. Playing with Fire

  11. Draining Pockets

  12. How We Beat the Garbage Gougers and Their Stinking High Prices

  13. Fee Fatigue

  14. “Wells Fargo Will Take Your House”

  15. Giving to Goldman

  16. Please Die Soon

  17. Your 201(k) Plan

  18. Wimpy’s Tab

  19. Pfizer’s Bitter Pill

  20. Hollywood Robbery

  21. Silly Software

  22. Pilfering Your Paycheck

  23. Of Commas and Character

  24. What It All Means

  25. Solutions

  ADDING IT ALL UP

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  [ AUTHOR’S NOTE ]

  When Major League Baseball came to San Francisco in 1958, someone gave my father two Giants tickets. Dad had no interest in what he called commercial sports, but Mom was a baseball fanatic, so one chilly May evening she took her third-grader to his first ball game.

  Peppered with my questions, my gray-haired mother found a way to keep my mind occupied. “Imagine if you could figure out how to make everyone in Seals Stadium give you a nickel!” she said. I took the implied arithmetic problem and ran with it.

  By picking a nickel, my mother had complicated the math. I diligently counted blocks of seats and multiplied by five, remembering numbers as I moved on to the next section, starting over when I made a mistake. After the seventh inning I declared my answer: $1,100, about $8,800 in today’s money. My mother folded back a page on the program that listed the number of seats and showed me her penciled-in calculation.

  “Very good,” she said of my estimate, “but how much is only half the answer. Now, tell me how could you get a nickel from everyone here?”

  That second question is the one that stayed with me—and that inspired this book. Half a century later, I’m still pondering, but in a bigger way, how it applies to your life and mine. As in: How have all of us consumers ended up paying so many extra charges on electric, phone and other bills?

  This book is about the many ways that corporations extract from you those extra nickels—which add up to thousands of dollars. Many of the mechanisms require the government’s cooperation; some of them are the result of seemingly unconnected sources; others are hidden in plain sight.

  I promise you, however, the explanation is right there before you, whether you’ve done the reading or not. It’s in the fine print.

  1…

  Jacking Up Prices

  The distribution of wealth is not determined by nature. It is determined by public policy.

  —Eric Schneiderman, New York State attorney general

  1. Friends and colleagues have always known that Adam Leipzig husbands his own money and reliably earns profits on funds others entrust to him. As a young executive at Disney, Leipzig oversaw Dead Poets Society; Good Morning, Vietnam; and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Later, as president of National Geographic Films, he was behind March of the Penguins. His films have brought in $2.1 billion, seven times what it cost to produce them. That makes him a Hollywood rarity—a reliable steward for investors in the risky business of moviemaking.

  Because it was so small, the one thing Leipzig never gave much thought to was his monthly phone bill. When it came, Leipzig checked to see how many long-distance calls, if any, had been made and wrote a check. But his casual view changed one day near the turn of the century during a meeting at the AT&T offices in Los Angeles.

  Leipzig had wrangled a meeting with AT&T marketing executives to propose a strategic alliance to help him start his own film production company. Leipzig left with everything he wanted, but a decade later the terms of his successful deal were mostly forgotten. What remained vivid in his memory was what the phone guys had said about the future of his and everyone else’s telephone bills. Their private comments differed dramatically from what everyone in America had been hearing for a quarter century about the costs of telephone calls
and, for the previous five or so years, about this wondrous new thing called the Internet. The promise of cheap and abundant telecommunications service, to be available almost anywhere, was becoming a major theme in telecommunications industry marketing.

  But that was not at all what the telephone guys said in private while meeting with Leipzig.

  “They said their corporate strategy was that, within a few years, AT&T wanted to draw at least $100 a month from each client household,” Leipzig recalled. “They would do this with phone service, and also things they were not offering at the time, or had not expanded as much—mobile, Internet and cable.”

  As your monthly phone bill probably tells you, this is exactly what has happened. At the time, Adam Leipzig’s home phone bill ran $35 a month. A decade later, the total amount due AT&T every month was more than $200, even though he buys his cable television service from another company.

  What the marketing executives had forecast had indeed come to pass.

  THE RISE OF FALLING PRICES

  Since 1974, politicians, pundits and professional economists all have said that, thanks to competition, the cost of telephone service would fall. The Justice Department sued that year to break up the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, saying Ma Bell’s monopoly hindered new technologies and shouldered aside competitors who wanted in on the lucrative business of long-distance calls. (Back then calls were so expensive that many people kept little sand dials by their telephones when calling loved ones long distance so as not to go a second too long saying good-bye and be charged for another full minute.) Eventually the antitrust case was settled by negotiation and, in 1984, Ma Bell spun off seven regional telephone monopolies known as the Baby Bells.

  AT&T kept the lucrative long-distance business, but even before the breakup, another monopoly business, a railroad, found a way to compete in long-distance calling. Southern Pacific Railroad began offering limited long-distance service in 1972. SP microwave towers, which kept the trains running on time, sent signals along the narrow rights-of-way that the federal government had given the railroad in the nineteenth century. These towers had the capacity to handle calls, too, and by 1978 SP was providing a cheap long-distance system connecting business customers in Los Angeles, San Diego and Anaheim, California, with those in three East Coast cities, Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

  Southern Pacific Communications would eventually evolve into today’s Sprint Nextel, but by the 1990s, a number of competing systems were being served by a growing network of glass fibers buried alongside the tracks. These braided glass strands, each thinner than a human hair, held vastly more capacity than the microwave system, which in turn was far more powerful than the old copper wires used to make the first commercial telephone call in 1878 and still in use today in most homes and small businesses. In the last decade of the twentieth century, the whole country buzzed with talk of a new Information Superhighway that would connect everyone in America; the oft-expressed expectation was that, thanks to competition, prices would fall lower and lower. Some published studies even showed that the cost of long-distance calling would fall more than 99 percent, which was not exactly good news for AT&T as a dedicated long-distance company, nor for its nascent competitors. In Washington, awestruck lawmakers marveled at the idea that every word and image in all 22 million books in the Library of Congress could be sent in the blink of an eye to any place connected by the new fiber-optic cables.

  Across the country from our friend Adam Leipzig, Bruce Kushnick in Brooklyn, New York, had his own epiphany. Visiting an aging aunt, Kushnick discovered twenty years’ worth of monthly telephone bills. Kushnick worked as a telephone industry consultant, paid to extol the virtues of the coming new era of digital communications.

  Kushnick knew a research gold mine when he saw one, and he set to work. When he cross-checked his aunt’s telephone bills over the years, he could hardly believe the numbers. His aunt paid $9.51 for her local phone service in 1984. By 2003 her bill had swollen fourfold to $38.90. In the two decades since the breakup of the AT&T monopoly, even after adjusting for inflation, his aunt’s telephone cost $2.30 for each dollar paid in 1984. And that was without any charges for long-distance calls.

  His little history lesson prompted Kushnick to think about the telephone bill itself. Old telephone bills—from the era of the Great Depression of the 1930s, for example—often consisted of three lines. One was the monthly charge. The second was the cost of long-distance calls. The third was the total.

  With the passing years, Kushnick noted, the bills had gotten more and more complicated. When AT&T started offering phones in colors, colored phones came with an extra charge. So did the immensely popular Princess telephone for the bedroom in 1959. In 1963 the first push-button phones were introduced (called Touch-Tone), and people paid extra to escape rotary dialing. Two years later came sleek Trimline phones with lighted dials—along with another extra charge.

  The publicly switched telephone network, as it was known in the industry, was upgraded for emergency calls to 911. Then it was upgraded again with ANI (automatic number indicator) so that emergency dispatch centers would know the numbers of callers, and later with ALI, or automatic location indicator. The cost of ALI was justified, as it saved the lives of many people in the midst of medical emergencies or assaults, even if they were unable to say where they were. But the public paid both for its installation and for some other things, too, as some of the money collected was diverted to other uses, including new equipment the phone companies said was necessary to make ALI work.

  Soon after the railroad rights-of-way microwave towers made possible the first sliver of long-distance calling competition, telephone bills became even more complicated. In the late 1970s, while the breakup of Ma Bell was under negotiation with the Justice Department, AT&T began seeking limits on free directory-assistance calls. It seemed a curious move—Ma Bell executives and spokesmen at the time told anyone who would listen that free directory-assistance calls encouraged more calling—but the AT&T shift away from free directory assistance was brilliant in the way that it quietly raised prices.

  State utility regulators were told that telemarketing companies were taking advantage of free directory assistance, placing many thousands of calls to 411. That, in turn, was described as a hidden cost borne by residential and small-business customers. Thus, AT&T was able to argue that the consumer would pay a little bit less if fewer operators were employed looking up numbers for “junk calls.”

  The state utility regulators might have just slapped a charge on any business that made large numbers of directory assistance calls. Or a rule could have been adopted that applied only to telemarketing firms and commercial customers. Instead, as the telephone company had requested, the state regulators limited how many free calls to directory assistance any customer could make.

  At first, the limit was ten calls. Over time, the limit was trimmed in stages to zero; by 2008, “free” had become a fee, with many customers paying $1.99 each time they called directory assistance, adding more lines of fine print to telephone bills. Verizon Wireless and some other companies did not list charges for calling directory assistance separately, but hid them in plain sight among the monthly list of calls made, a portion of the bill many people typically find tiresome to examine line by line.

  Today it’s typical to be charged for not being listed in the telephone directory, and, by the way, it’s not a one-time fee to defray the cost of flipping an internal computer signal, but a monthly fee. Think of it as a charge for no service. Over the years the white pages, which used to be dropped free on every doorstep, became less common and less thorough; they no longer appear in some communities. That translates to an increased number of calls to directory assistance—for which a fee is collected. While various white-pages listings appeared on the Internet, the telephone companies spent little to keep them up to date, which of course drove more business to paid 411 services. When new services such as call waiting and three-party calling were
introduced, they bore stiff additional charges, too.

  With AT&T’s breakup into Ma and the seven Baby Bells, new charges were introduced for regional calls, those that were neither local nor long distance. Known as Local Access and Transport Area or LATA, the implementation of this system also meant that, in some metropolitan markets, the circle shrank within which unlimited calls could be made at no extra charge. In some cases a call to a neighbor went from free to dear because of illogical LATA boundaries.

  New costs came at the consumer from all angles. Until the 1984 breakup, regulations required customers to use the telephone set installed by Ma Bell. After the breakup, customers were told they could either buy or rent their phone. At first, the rental seemed cheap, but gradually people learned how little a telephone costs to make and also realized how much an open-ended rental could cost.

  And then there was the expense associated with making sure the phone line in your house actually worked. Ma Bell got state public utility commissions to transfer ownership of the telephone line at the point where it entered your home or office. Once that happened, customers had to pay to fix any wires inside their homes or businesses that, say, got wet or gnawed by a rodent. But there was an option, namely a monthly “wire maintenance” fee, which added yet another extra charge for what once had been included in the basic price.

  Bit by bit, the line items grew, and others were added. It was easy to miss the escalating prices because they came separately over time—a nickel on one line of the bill, a quarter or two on another. With many small line items, people tended not to notice how the total was creeping upward much faster than the rate of inflation or the size of their income.

  Kushnick found his aunt’s bills printed on multiple slips of paper, making it hard to spot everything at once. He noticed some charges were for services his aunt did not use; a few were for services she couldn’t possibly use because her telephone was too antiquated. And the monthly rental for the phone itself? Kushnick calculated that his aunt had paid more than twenty times the price of the instrument with that small monthly rental fee.