On Sky and the Sharpness of Glass.

There’s an ad on my email home page for something called Sky Glass. I have no idea what Sky Glass is and I haven’t the slightest desire to find out, but what interests me is Sky’s way of doing business. The ad reads:

Order yours now for £36 a month.

So here we are with a cost of living crisis going on and many people suffering serious hardship as a result, and Sky still considers it worthwhile trying to sell people something called Sky Glass for the princely sum of £36 a month. (I presume it’s another item of fatuous media drivel, but that’s not the real point of the post.) The real point is this:

They don’t simply set you up with a regular subscription which has always been the standard way in such matters. What they do is loan the subscriber four years worth of subscriptions which the customer has to pay back at the prescribed rate of £36 a month. Do you see where they’re going with this? It isn’t a simple subscription for a service any more. It’s a legally binding credit agreement which keeps the poor benighted customer trapped in their nasty little corporate web for the next four years.

To somebody like me, this smacks of sharp practice, but what political system has the will to rein in the corporate world when the corporate world is the principle god of rampant capitalism and materialistic mania? I assume this is why Sky’s boss has never been consigned to an otherwise uninhabited island where he belongs.