While shredding old, unnecessary paperwork today, I noticed that the cost of our monthly utilities have more than doubled in 8 years, yet almost nothing in our way of life has changed.

We live in exactly the same apartment. We still have no kids. We still have only 1 TV, but the new one uses less juice. We both use modern laptops and iPads, which also use less juice, so our monthly kWh has not gone up, but our power bill has more than doubled.

We still have a mobile phone each, but now we have iPhones and data charges. We still face dropped calls and spotty data access. We still have cable TV, internet and a landline. We still have the basic package, the same number of channels. The “triple-play” deal was supposed to be cheaper. It costs double!

Lucky for us we live in an apartment where water and heating are included in the far higher rent. I can just imagine burden of those increases on non-apartment dwellers.

My Take: Either consumers are facing some serious inflation here in the USA or the utility monopolies have won. I’m voting the latter as costs have doubled yet service levels have remained dismal.

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