Ann Beam’s Wheatland, WI home was destroyed by a tornado earlier this month. Then a snow storm hit and made clean up difficult. To top it off, she opened her Time Warner Cable bill and saw a $2,000 charge for the 5 (9-year-old) cable boxes and remotes that were destroyed in the tornado.
She immediately called the cable company. She said she spoke to two different people, one who said he was a manager, and was told there was nothing the company could do.
“They said I would have to take the bill and turn it in to my insurance company,” Beam said.
She isn’t the only one opening similar bills from TWC. Tornado-ravaged Wheatland is full of destroyed cable boxes. Not knowing what else to do, Beam turned to the media to help her out. That got some results.
“We understand this is an unusual situation,” Celeste Flynn, director of public affairs for Time Warner Cable, told the Kenosha News. “All they will need to do is call and we will take the equipment off their account.”
Cable TV bills with a twist [KenoshaNews]
UPDATE: Alex from Time Warner Cable writes in to confirm that it’s TWC’s policy to waive charges in the event of a disaster.
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@Buran: That was my first thought as well. Are there any lawyers or accountants who can clarify how depreciation factors into liability?
Sounds like the cable companies just want to scam some quick cash out of the insurance companies.
Every company that thinks you can write their charges off to insurance inflates their costs, every last one.
People, the real enemy here is the tornado. Let’s not forget that. To hell with tornados.
Oh. And Comcast. To hell with them too.
Making their customers (OR their insurance companies) pay full replacement costs strikes me as very questionable. As noted, it must be assumed that they are writing off depreciation on the equipment and one further assumes they’ll probably do the same for the new equipment that they just had purchased for them. That just all seems very sketchy and I wonder if its the sort of thing the IRS might want to pay closer attention to. This could make for quite a scam.
This sounds like a classic case of a company milking insurance for all they can get knowing that there’s a deep pocket to pick. It’s the same thing that the health care system does when it charges $8 an aspirin and whatnot. People tend not to fight such charges when insurance covers it but it’s the sort of thing that keeps premiums high.
The fact that some people say “that’s what insurance is for” and shrug it off goes to show that the public is too indifferent to stop things like charging more than $400 apiece for outdated hardware.
@Greasy Thumb Guzik: For real though, I immediately thought, FIVE!?.
Then again, I grew up in a poor rural area where people would live in trailers but yet have 5 flat screen tvs, 5 cable boxes, 5 surround-sound systems, and probably 5 mortgages. Crazy!
I remember a little incident with Cox Communications a few years ago. They changed boxes and told us to throw it away. When we moved we suddenly received a $500 bill for a box that was no longer in use and of course we did not have. After I called up they said they would remove it and instead turned it over to a collection agency who prompty reported it on my credit report.
I disputed with the credit bureaus and the company but they verified and continued to call multiple times a day. They told me they could care less if I disputed or not. I filed a complaint with the Texas attorney general and they ignored the dispute. Armed with this letter I called up and gave them one last chance to remove it and was told ‘if you do not like it then sue us’. I filed a small claims against the collection agency for violations of the FDCPA and FCRA and 1 week later had a check for $1000, an apology, and a deletion from the credit files.
@G0lluM: Because that’s all the company can purchase from the manufacturer. Also, your comparing a purchased vehicle versus leased.
The companies have insurance for their set-tops located in their location, not the customers home.
I love how they always say “there’s nothing we can do.” Oh really, why is that? Isn’t this YOUR company? Aren’t you setting the rules? Then the response she gets is “call us and we’ll take it off.” Didn’t she try that and get told “there’s nothing we can do”? insanity!
@swalve:
If a person is renting an apartment room and a tornado destroys it, does the tenant have to pay to have the room rebuilt?
it’s a sorry assed time in this country when the only way some problems can be corrected is by alerting the media….
When our house burned down in the Oklahoma wildfires a couple of years ago we had to pay Cox Cable about $800 for a couple of converter boxes. Luckily we had good insurance so we just payed it. But it still seemed a little pricey…
Come on. It’s a clerical error and they fixed it. Do we really need to give top-billing to a mistake that was already, before this was even posted, corrected (as you can tell by the Time Warner comment in the post). It’d be nice if every company fixed problems like these so quickly.
@Blueskylaw: With a nickname like that, I’m surprised you think those are similar situations.
So she was renting her house, and it got destroyed by God, and she had to pay the landlord for the whole house???
@Toddgr:
It was already fixed because the lady had already turned to the media for help.