[pgaddict]

Well, people don't realize a lot of the bad stuff actually makes business sense. It's not that the companies are meant to be evil, but once you are a customer, they have little to gain from treating you as well as potential customers.

For example, once you subscribe to a cable TV / cell phone operator / whatever, they'll keep you on that subscription until the contract ends, even if new customers can sign up for half the price. And even then it's a matter of how much you spend with them and if it's worth negotiating a better contract.

This has little to do with the corporations being intentionally 'evil', it's more about insufficient competition or even monopoly (how many cable TV operators / ISPs are in your area?). We have multiple cell phone operators over here, but they have little incentive to compete - the number of people leaving/joining each operator is about the same, and if one operator decreases the prices the others will do the same, eliminating any advantage.