Despite several months of intensive marketing, Enron signed up just 50,000 households in California, about 1 percent of the market. Contrary to Ken Lay’s expectations, consumers weren’t willing to go to the trouble of switching from their reliable old utility, even with Enron’s offer of a rate discount. All that grassroots outrage about monopoly power that Lay talked about, the pent-up rage at the utilities—it simply didn’t exist.
