Hey Cable Provider: How About an A La Carte Menu?

’m so angry at my cable provider right now. I have what they call a “lifestyle” package. My interests are mostly cooking channels, home and garden, old nostalgic stuff and music. And even though I thought the package could have included a little more in the cooking/home and garden areas, I was pretty happy with it. Mostly I watched the Food Network, the Cooking Channel, and HGTV. And that’s how it was for a few years.

But a couple of weeks ago, they took away the Cooking Channel. Oh, they still carry it, just not in the lifestyle package. Whaaaat? How could you take half the cooking programming in a so-called lifestyle package? That seems ridiculous to me. I have a ton of sports channels that I will never watch in a million years. I’ll trade you all of them for the Cooking Channel.

Now, I don’t want to upgrade my package so that I’m paying an extra $100 dollars a month just to get the cooking channel. But how about if I pay another 10 bucks a month to get that channel. Come to think of it, why can’t we order our channels a la carte? I will gladly pay what I pay now for less channels. As long as they’re channels I watch. That seems fair, doesn’t it? You can have all the sports channels back, most of the news channels back, give me back my Cooking Channel and maybe add another house and garden type channel and we’ll call it even. 

I say a la carte menu is the way to go. What do you say, cable provider? Everybody else is already streaming, so why don’t you keep old-fashioned non-streaming customers like me happy? It’s just a thought, but a good one in my humble opinion. I just think it's better to pay for what I watch, not for what I don’t watch.