IS CABLE UNBUNDLING OVERRATED?

Here’s the truth: You don’t want your cable to be unbundled. You just want to pay less for it.

Seriously, guys, you like bundling. You know how I know this? You seek it out in your consumer products. You want your hotel to give you free Wi-Fi and you don’t want it to charge you by the towel. Many of you go on all-inclusive vacations and cruises. You buy mobile-phone contracts to get a “free” phone rather than pay by the minute. You are constantly — and I mean constantly — complaining that your health insurance is not more comprehensive, even though this would just mean you’d pay more for the insurance. And I won’t even get started on your agonized wails when airlines started charging you to check a bag and stopped providing a “free” plate of congealed mystery meat. You buy books and subscribe to magazines rather than pay by the article or the chapter. You love bundles. What you hate is the size of your cable bill.

Why do you like bundling? Because you don’t want to have to think about it. Oh, sure, there are people who would like to spend their days obsessively managing their minutes, reading and towels in order to save 5 percent, but the rest of us would rather not spend our time worrying about blowing the Wi-Fi budget. So we go for the all-inclusive package.

And, in fact, unbundling doesn’t necessarily save money. Imagine you’re running a hotel. You could charge guests for every little thing, from washcloths to television rental to electricity usage. After all, I often don’t use all the towels, so why do I have to pay for them? Why don’t you offer them a la carte?

Because your guests would dislike it, of course — they’d be wasting a lot of their vacation time arranging for add-ons, and they’d feel penny-pinched. More important, all those transactions would be costly. You’d have to install electricity meters, and pay a staffer to go around reading them before checkout. You’d have a staffer in charge of towel rentals and a customer service person to mediate disputes with guests over whether they got all the towels they paid for. Someone would have to go hook up a television in any room that requested one. That labor cost would have to be added into the price of the service, so everyone except the cheapskates who packed their own towels would be paying more for the same stuff. Customer satisfaction would fall, especially since you’d be creating lots more opportunities for disputes.

So instead you bundle all the stuff that everyone uses, from electricity to towels, and only charge for stuff where expenditures are highly variable, such as room service. The guests are happier, costs are lower and everyone has a lot less hassle.

But are hotels and cable comparable?