The front counter was a place where local customers could pay bills in person and handle a variety of issues from shut-offs and late payments to gas connections. It was staffed by long-time employee Shelly Flax, who said she handled up to 100 customers a day, many of them agricultural workers and people without computers.
The closures are part of a widespread movement to close all 84 front counters in PG&E's service area, a swath of the state extending from Bakersfield to the Oregon border. The 2005 decision drew legal challenge and only nine of the least-used counters - in Alameda, Newman, Orland, Willits, Corcoran, Willow Creek, Petaluma, Half Moon Bay and Geyserville - were closed, according to a settlement document from the California Public Utilities Commission.
|
|
"It's not infrequent, let me tell you," said Fatima Soares, executive director of the social services agency Coastside Hope. "A lot of people I know have to pay this way."
Cash customers include workers in local nurseries and farms who do not have bank accounts as well as the elderly, she added. The advocacy group has a fund that helps with shut-off notices and deals frequently with payment centers.
Instead of full-service front counters, PG&E contracted with local businesses to take payments on behalf of the power company. The so-called "neighborhood payment centers" aren't designed to answer customer questions, but only to accept payments.
"It's labor intensive, we were losing sales off the floor because of this," said Ben Tyson, owner of Strawflower Electronics, which became a neighborhood payment center when PG&E closed its front counter, which had been located within Strawflower Electronics.
Tyson dropped out of the neighborhood payment center plan more than six weeks ago.
Tyson noted that his employees had to tally significant payments, with the responsibility for other people's money if any errors were made. Strawflower was processing more than 600 cash or check-only receipts a month for phone payments and balancing the transactions correctly was taking longer than his regular store receipts, he added.
"The risk-to-reward wasn't a business decision that we were looking for," said Tyson.
There were also problems with scanners and communications with the designated PG&E payment contractor, Check Free Pay, said Tyson. He said that a free advertising perk that was supposed to list Strawflower Electronics on phone bills as a payment center never materialized. Strawflower was listed as a center on the PG&E Web site, said Tyson, but that listing included the wrong location.
Tyson said he felt the crunch of providing services to those left out of PG&E's mainstream customer base.
"You know who's really getting hurt the worst on this? The poor and the Spanish-speaking community," said Tyson. "The last I saw, cash is still legal tender. In Mexico you don't pay your bill by mail, you go down to the plaza and get a receipt. And if the bill is overdue you go to the bank."
After Strawflower Electronics bowed out, the Medicine Shoppe on Stone Pine Road tried serving as a payment center for about a month, said owner Harish Odedra. But he, too, quickly dropped the service. The last day for payments there was last week. Odedra declined to elaborate on his decision.
The Coastside's sole neighborhood payment center is now at Hilltop Bait, Tackle and Deli, across from the Hilltop Mobile Home Park on Highway 92. Services there have just begun - though the PG&E Web site still listed the Medicine Shoppe as the Coastside payment center as late as Tuesday.
"When we talk to our customers, they want convenience," said Jon Tremayne, a PG&E spokesman. He noted that "significant improvements" in the range of services available from call centers and in online payment were outstripping any advantages front counters may have had.
"More can be done contacting our local call centers than going to a front counter," said Tremayne. Help is available in 260 languages at a call center, he added, and the new system of payment centers in local businesses has advantages as well.
"We can't require our employees to speak a certain language," he said of traditional front counters. "But the neighborhood payment centers are usually reflective of the area."
In Half Moon Bay the bulk of front counter customers speak Spanish. Employees at Strawflower say they were usually caught short in that department, but Medicine Shoppe staffers said they always have a Spanish-speaker around and it was a necessity for the service.
"In talking to the subset of customers who use these payment counters, they are indifferent as to where they are," said Tremayne. "As long as there is a local place to make those payments.
"Absolutely we are committed to having something in Half Moon Bay," he added. "Not over the hill, in Half Moon Bay."
w