Yep, we ran into this in the hospitality industry back in the day on phone call markups. At some point, the states realized that the amount of 'profit' between the amount we paid as the hotel and the amount we charged the guest, was taxable. The problem came when trying to determine that on every single phone call for an entire month as there was no way to reliably and accurately account for it. And to prevent problems, we were required to just pay tax on the whole gross 'phone sales' which many times ate more than any 'profit' because the tax was on a much larger amount. So what ended up happening is that hotels just stopped charging extra for phone calls, and even stopped using call accounting machines that were supposed to calculate the charge--because again is it impossible to reliably and accurately account for every single call to every single guest folio. It also helped that the costs on long distance started to drop and just be bundled in with a commercial line with a 'cap' of xxx minutes. And then the cell phones came along and completely wiped out the phone. And those hotels that were lucky enough to have run cat5 for the room phone runs were able to re-purpose it for the 'next big thing'--Internet access in every room.

So I think you're absolutely right--Hertz didn't want to take on the title and responsibility of an 'energy provider'.