If you’ve ever been a cable subscriber, you know the yearly routine. One month, you’ll open your bill, and be struck with sticker shock. An expiring promotion can mean your rate doubles overnight!

Angrily, you call the customer service number on the bill to demand an explanation. You go through the automated phone tree, wait on hold for however long, and unload on the poor call center employee until you can get your monthly rate back down into reasonable territory with another promotion.

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge

For most of us, this is the cost of doing business with a TV provider, and we’ve come to expect it every 6 months, or year, or however often the discount runs out.

Enter Charter CEO Tom Rutledge, a man millions are getting to know as his company takes over both the nation’s former second-largest cable provider, Time Warner Cable, as well as Bright House Networks, another smaller cable company. Rutledge described the ritual at Time Warner Cable, which he’s been adamant about ending as Charter takes over their markets, speaking at a conference last week:

It was a Turkish bazaar. You’d call in, bargain, and they would invent a package.

Easier Said Than Done

Consumers notoriously hate this process, and with good reason. It’s a regular time-waster, that begins with customers feeling surprised and ripped off, and after some amount of time, and tense negotiation with the cable company, generally ends with a bill that’s not a far off from what it was before.

Rutledge is tired of it too. But his moves to eliminate the process haven’t really been going over well, especially among Time Warner Cable’s customer base.

In exchange for the onerous ‘Turkish bazaar’ model, Rutledge’s favored solution is for subscribers to simply stick with the higher rates.

Unsurprisingly, the response has been over 100,000 Time Warner Cable and Bright House customers canceling their service when Charter’s Spectrum brand comes to town, spikes their rates, but then won’t play ball when customers call in to lower their rates as they could with Time Warner and most other cable providers.

Charter’s clumsy integration of new customers following the merger has left consumers nostalgic for one of the most hated companies in the country: Time Warner Cable. No small feat!

Charter Plays Hardball

Living in an area formerly served by Bright House Networks, I received three letters from Charter within the span of about a week.

The first was to inform me that I’d be receiving future bills and service from the new Charter Spectrum brand.

The second was a letter from Rutledge telling me how great this newly-merged TV provider was going to be for everyone.

The third was a notice that my rates would be going up nearly $40 to over $150 a month for TV and internet service.

I promptly became a newly-minted cord-cutter, ditching the Spectrum TV service.

Frustrated as I was, apparently I was lucky. Other new Spectrum customers have reported far more unsavory tactics: TV service being cut off until customers agree to higher rates, for example.

In speaking to the media, Rutledge has been pretty clear: customers should be paying more.

Against the Grain

Charter’s moves don’t seem to be lining up with the rest of the industry.

Among consumers, the consensus is that cable TV is already over-priced, if not a total ripoff. And they’re right. Cable TV is the most profitable sector of the media industry.

It’s also important to factor in customer acquisition costs, which often makes extending a discount more favorable than simply losing the subscriber.

In other words, it’s a bit hard to buy Rutledge’s allegation that Time Warner Cable was giving away the store before Charter took over.

Plenty of criticism has been leveled at Time Warner Cable over the years, but that their prices were too low is a new one. Especially coming from a CEO whose pay is nearing the 9-figure range.

In addition to a puzzling stance on pricing, Charter doesn’t appear to have plans for virtual pay-TV, or even more affordable programming bundles.

Dish Network and AT&T can still recapture some revenue from lost pay-TV customers through Sling and DirecTV Now.

Comcast’s X1 Platform

Verizon and Cablevision have experimented with smaller and more flexible TV packages. Comcast has earned high marks for its X1 set top box experience.

Among the nation’s largest TV providers, Charter seems to be the only one without a response to the changing landscape of the TV business. Since their big merger, their plan seems to be to stick to their guns on pricing, and swallow any sub losses that result.

For investors, constantly spooked by cord-cutting’s impact on the media business, that’s a heck of a gulp.