Why is refusal to pay bills or rent considered a civil matter, while refusal to pay a restautant bill considered criminal? What's the difference?
Why is refusal to pay bills or rent considered a civil matter, while refusal to pay a restautant bill considered criminal? What's the difference?
Both utility bills and restaurant bills are demands to satisfy a debt after the service have been rendered. And in cases of rental properties, it's refusal to pay even before the service (the legal right to reside in the property) is rendered, since most leases require paying on the first of the month. Why shouldn't they all just be considered either all civil or all criminal. I don't understand the inconsistency in legislation.
Country: United States of America
You're viewing a single thread.
Because the law is there to protect big business. There are not big business utilities, but there are big business restaurants.
No big business utilities? PG&E is worth $35 billion. Duke Energy is close to $70 billion. The list goes on. These are fortune 500 companies that employ small towns worth of people.
Utilities are damn near as big as it gets.
Utilities are regulated and provided by the local government. They're not a business like McDonalds is.
You're right that most utility markets are regulated, but it is typically handled at a state level, not local. In most of the US, municipal governments are not the provider of electric and gas utilities, although there are certainly many exceptions. Additionally, when those small local utilities are given a service territory they are often just reselling energy purchased from a large utility.
I've worked for a large utility for the last decade. We're a business just like McDonalds. We take in raw materials and convert them to a product that our customers want to buy. We try to attract new customers through advertising and good service. We lobby the politicians that regulate our market. We do all those business things, and we do it in the name of profit.
There are a lot of small co-op utilities that don't work quite the same way. If large utilities were banks, those little co-ops would be credit unions. That type of utility is awesome because they are able to be more customer focused. Unfortunately most of them lose out on economies of scale, so their customers may not actually see any savings in comparison to the big guys.
If you still don't believe utilities are big business, look at NextEra Energy. They're worth about $150 billion, give or take a couple billion. That means they have a higher valuation than the combined worth of Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Longhorn, etc), Dominos, Wendy's, Papa John's, Chipotle, Burger King, and the Yum Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, etc).
These large utilities aren't just bigger business than most restaurants. They're an order of magnitude larger.