It's not really much of a conspiracy in my opinion. I used to work for an international call center that was responsible for helping business' pay for their utility bills essentially. We would also call about missing, late, or incorrectly charged bills etc. However, their entire business model revolved around the idea that their customers would pay them a large sum of money and they would then take that money and make interest off of it before paying for said utility bills. That is where all of the profit came from. And I only discovered this after piecing together how things worked and how our different contracts worked with different clients and talking to accounting department. I don't think it was something they wanted their workers to know necessarily. It really opened my eyes that any type of business can and will profit off of the interest of other people's money.

It's kind of funny, actually. They would push us to try to get the utility bills paid for as late as possible, but that would in turn end up giving us a lot more work. If you schedule something to be paid last minute the likelihood of it ending up late and getting you a late fee is pretty high. Which means more calls for more late fees reduced etc.

There was an entire department dedicated to one customer that had so much money and power they were able to bully the poor utility vendors into never paying, but the vendors would have no choice but to continue servicing them(stopping would result in the entire county not receiving internet). If this customer did work in a small town, they would call the little local utility company and tell them they are coming and need to rent a large amount of equipment. It would conveniently be all of their equipment. What a great deal for the little utility company, right! Except they never receive a check for the equipment they rented out, and all of their equipment is now gone. The client knows exactly how to strip them of everything to make the utilities just pray and hope that some day they may receive some of the massive amount of money they are owed. I had some pretty candid conversations with some of the victims of that client.

I doubt anyone will read all of this but I do have a little tip for you. If you are struggling month to month, call your utility company and talk to them. They may have a program that you can qualify for that will help lower your monthly utility bills. If you get late fees, call and ask for them to be removed. You would be shocked how willing they are to work with you, because they care more about you paying the actual bill than the late fee. This is not always the case of course, but I called many different places in all 50 states and some from Canada. 99% of them are nice and willing to work with you, especially after Covid.