Heating oil contracts in the record cold

The news tonight reported on a real-life contracts issue near and dear to my heart, since my grandmother got caught up in an identical situation with her oil. Basically, New England has been in the middle of a two-week stretch of below-freezing temperatures, unusual for us. It’s cold here, but not usually -18. Lots of people have contracts with oil companies that provide for automatic tank refill. These contracts are not cheap to enter into. My grandmother’s cost hundreds of dollars a year, and that’s just for them to show up; we still have to pay for the oil on top of it. But, because everyone’s been using more oil than usual, the oil companies have been caught completely unprepared for how many of their automatic-renewal-contract customers have needed oil. How unprepared? Well, my 85-year-old grandmother spent more than 12 hours completely without heat, problematic in the arctic cold we were gripped in. And the problem is: What were our options? We’d paid hundreds of dollars to never be left in a situation, we thought, when our grandmother’s tank would go empty. That was supposed to be the point of the contract, that we wouldn’t have to worry about her running out of oil. But that was exactly what happened. 

And, as the news report makes clear, once you enter into this contract, you’re not allowed to get your oil from anybody else. So we were in a situation where we couldn’t get the service we’d paid for, and we were prohibited by contract from getting the service from anyone else. As the news report states, the oil company may waive the fee on a case-by-case basis. But, for many people on limited incomes dealing with already expensive heating costs, taking the risk of being charged a $399 fee might not be acceptable.