Supermarkets and discount stores might sell electricity just as they sell long-distance telephone cards. Or employers might offer employees the right to buy at the corporate rate. Low-income consumers, disproportionately found in large cities where electricity rates are often high, could band together for better rates. In New York City, some residents recently formed a buying cooperative to reduce their electricity costs. Reliability, which is high now, may even increase, and prices will stabilize because consumers will demand it.
Some consumers are leery about a competitive electricity market.
They wonder whom they will call when the lights go out. Some are afraid that competition could lead to wildly fluctuating power prices and the possibility that brokers won't seek rural or inner-city customers, thereby putting price cuts out of reach. Or they may imagine their grandmother's power getting cut off by a profit-seeking power company. Many of them have been spread by the monopoly utilities that don't want to give up their profitable status quo. Some utilities spent millions of dollars setting up dummy grass-roots organizations to spread their propaganda.