Originally Posted by
David.Lewis
There's something fishy going on, and has been going on for a while now. We haven't gotten the smart meter and smart thermostat sales pitch from the power company yet, but I've read stories of people who have, and how the company told them that the company would have the ability to change the thermostat or reduce power consumption on "very rare" circumstances. That's a hard "no" for me, and a hint to the future.
But, more broadly, we've experienced some rather odd behavior across a wide range of businesses. And, it started around the same time the scamdemic started.
A while back, the electric company came out to replace a pole. Didn't tell anyone in the neighborhood. Just came out and shut the power off. When I approached the foreman, he shrugged his shoulders and said "well, someone should have told you". He clearly didn't give a fuck, nor was he curious as to whether anyone in the neighborhood was on oxygen or had mission-critical electronics up and running and needed time to kick on a backup generator. Instead of telling the truth, they lied, and said that they didn't know they were replacing a pole until a few minutes before coming out.
We were coming home kind of late one Tuesday night, and our son wanted tacos, and the sign on the door of one of those cute little mexican places read "Taco Tuesdays: $1 Tacos!" in big black letters so we stopped in. When the bill came, they tried to charge us 2.5x for each taco. It's such a small scam, but something I bet they got away with lots of times because most people aren't going to fight the bill after the fact.
A bigger scam that someone tried running on us is we ordered a new couch for the family room, and... it never came. Business went MIA, and this was from a business with a reputation in the NC furniture market, which is a closely knit family of businesses. And, when we finally got ahold of someone at the company, they gave us a song and dance and we caught them in several lies, the major one being they took the money and never made the couch and from the looks of it, never intended to make or deliver it. Thankfully we caught that one in time, and it was easy to charge back the amount due to blatant fraud.
A slightly larger scam was when we purchased our house in 2020. Unbeknownst to us, the neighbors intended to dispute the title to our property and then file a bogus lawsuit against us a year later. They knew they had no claim, but they (and their lawyer) were looking for a quick payoff, which is why they filed the complaint and then turned around and wanted a settlement from the title company before it went before a judge.
Between the small taco scam and the large real estate scam, we've encountered a variety of shady and shifty business practices, a significant drop in customer service at otherwise reputable and established businesses, and sometimes outright scams over the past two years—more than I can recall ever happening in such a short period of time. It's almost like people realize, on some level, that since the government has been running a huge, blatant, scam on the public for the past 2 years, it's OK if everyone else does it, and so now scamming folks has become normalized.