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Stealth Inflation
prostoalex writes "The New York Times on the Web explores the topic of incorrect bills and numerous surcharges with names like 'assessment', 'handling', 'restocking', etc. David Pogue quotes Business Week magazine, where it says that such small charges $100 million annually for hotels, $2 billion for banks and $11 billion for credit-card companies. Users of landline phones, cell phones, checking accounts and credit cards are starting to suspect that such huge revenue might imply the mistakes are made on purpose. Is it just another conspiracy theory, or are we becoming victims to the stealth inflation?"
How about physicians? I had a couple appointments with my family doctor to regulate my blood pressure... At one of the earlier appointments she took an EKG. Being 24 and never having one before I wanted it explained to me. She spent 2 or 3 minutes (and I am being loose here with the timeframe, it was only as long as it took me to put on my jacket and hat) explaining the peaks and what she thought they meant.
.02,
Out the door I went into the world to get a new prescription filled and pay my co-pay...
A few weeks pass and the bill from the doctor's office comes showing what the insurance company paid, etc, and that I owed $5. No biggy, pretty typical. I did see that she charged my insurance company $103 for an "EKG Consultation Fee". Call me insane but there is absolutely no way she had the right to charge $103 for a 2 minute deal.
I went in the next time and not so calmly explained to her that she will not do that again without a) telling me what she is going to later charge, b) lying about what she was really doing, and c) being a cheat.
We wonder why insurance costs so much... It's because of hidden fees and bullshit that the medical industry decides to make a quick buck on.
That doctor made as much in 2 minutes as I do in 6 hours at work... She will NOT fleece me again like that... To those of you that say, "who cares, your insurance covered it." I say that my insurance co-pays just went up and they probably won't stop there. I am not going to stand idly by and watch this shit go down and you shouldn't either.
How about my bank? TCF here in Minnesota. I *pay* for their advanced online banking service (it's just like any other free service I have had before but it shows all the transactions immediately unlike their free version which just shows a balance). I started noticing that I was being charged for using out of network ATMs when I wasn't using them. I had four $6 charges in a six week period. I had to call them each time and get them removed. It wasn't an issue to get it removed it was the unsettling feeling that other people out there that don't have the advanced online banking are getting ripped off, a lot.
Sad state of affairs these days...
Just my worthless
Inflation hasn't only gone up because of things like this, but because of the increasing dollar amount of taxes being subtracted from paychecks. Even if your paycheck is the same as 10 years ago, your take-home pay is very likely less. These surcharges are yet another way that make you think you're making the same amount - when really, you're making less and less, every day.
It all started with adding the sales tax to an item's advertised price to make up the real cost to purchase it.
That still annoys me.
sigs, as if you care.
It's sad that when people tell horror stories, others reply, "Yeah, that's about normal." We should not sit idly by while companies continue to 'mistakenly' swindle consumers out of money. I have personally spent countless hours fighting with RCN (a cable/phone/internet) company to refund $182.91 that they owe me. The full story is available at my RCN sucks page. I've had to resort to telling my credit card company to refuse payment, because RCN still refuses to return the money they owe me.
I'd be inclined to agree, at least some of these ridiculous surcharges are deliberate. Recently, I purchased some DDR Ram, for which they tried to charge me extra to test it. When it arrived, I installed it, and my machine did nothing at all. I got the RMA, and sent it back for refund - they told me I'd get the "restocking" fee.
Thankfully, I'd used VISA to buy it, and complained to my bank, which refunded it in toto. The company did, eventually, issue me a credit - not only did they take out their "restocking" fee, but charged me to test it when it got there, *and* then credited me based on the current price of the ram, not what I'd paid!
Thank heaven for VISA. I did get *all* my money back (had to let the bank take the pitiful excuse for a refund that the company issued).
So yes, these "hidden" charges are, in at least some cases, the way companies can increase their profit margins. Caveat emptor, indeed!
Lemon curry?
The poster proposes a false dilemma:
"Is it just another conspiracy theory, or are
we becoming victims to the stealth inflation?"
Clearly both are true, if one accepts the
non-standard uses of "stealth" and "inflation".
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Back in the 80's my mom used to record _all_ of her long distance calls and numbers on the calendar next to the phone (having only one phone, and little kids who didn't use it helped) and every few bills they'd try and screw us out of 50 cents to a dollar. After 2 years of calling up and screaming she started going into the main office and grumping in person, demanding the manager etc. After a couple of those and proof that we weren't home on days when calls were billed our bill mysteriously quit having problems and has been that way for the last 15 years.
I have to point out on my new Sprint bill, there is a $2.50 charge A MONTH for Number Portability, should I ever decide to change to another carrier. I know they had said it would be a reasonable fee, but that is outragous. Multiply that $2.50 per customer, per month, and that's one HELL of a profit. Sure would love to start a movement to blow that scam out of the water...
Mine means my own, but how can this be if I owe for it?
When I got my first student loan back in 1992, the cut out 4.5% right away... Called origination-destination charges or something like that...
:)
They took like $600 US before the check even arrived at the school!
You might notice these fees apply more to people who are in need. I remember when I first got out of school I had trouble saving money, and a few times my bank account fell below the minimum and they got me for $25 bucks. Of course now that I make a good income, I find that I don't get caught on many of those hidden fees. Everyone wants to be nice to me now
Of course I do pay higher taxes, but I really didn't notice that as much as you would think.
Peace, or Not?
When it comes to money (specifically, other people getting their hands on yours), everything is done on purpose. Everything. People will do anything they need to do, and will fight harder for money than they will for their own lives. Haven't you figured that out by now?
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
I used to work for an outsource bank data processor. We had a customer who required us to apply debits before credits because it generated more fees that way.
Not all banks did this, and it wasn't standard practice (at the time -- don't know now). It was odd enough that it was the talk of our company for a couple of weeks.
I've noticed this for years and its gotten entirely out of hand. I am now forced to ask people stupid questions like "How much does the $19.95 a day truck cost?" I was shocked to find out that at UHaul it actually cost 19.95 plus mileage.
I refuse to get phone service because of this, cell or otherwise. It is insane that the priveledge of using over 100 year old technology to talk to people costs on order of 1/2 the amount to power my house for a month.
I pay over $1,600 dollars a year in taxes for my house which is in a city. I always thought that city == trash pickup because of said taxes. Nope, they charge me 15 bucks a month on my water bill for trash, plus 4 dollars "maintence" on the sewer systems. I dunno what the sewer charge is for.
The only way that this is going to stop is if people stop paying for it. I have asked hotels to take off the safe charge.
Back to the phone thing. I promptly canceled my last phone after the 12.95 a month phone cost me over $26 (yes thats double!). I told them that it was deceitful and false advertising and under no circumstances was I goint to pay that, and I have been without a phone for 6 months or so (my work does pay for a cell, so I'm not that hardcore). This phone thing really pissed me off because it was a switch of providers that I agreed to because it was going to save me $10 a month. Being that I was writing a check for over $26 before and after, I do not see how I was saving anything. These extra costs make price comparison imposible and I think that it should be illegal.
Things such as deregulation, increased competition and globalization etc. have all squeezed profit margins. Adding these charges or systematically making mistakes that only a minority will catch all help to increase profits while keeping the headline cost of the product or service the same. Of course it makes comparing genuine prices impossible, but that's the point. It's also the point of making things like cell phone plans as complex as possible - they don't want you to be able to compare between competitors.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
My wife had a c-section last November and it required an epidural(sp?). The eppy needle left a slight leak of spinal fluid (happens about 3% or so of the time when they do them), which in turn lowers the brain fluid level, which can cause horrible headaches when the woman stands up (i.e. her brain slaps against the skull w/o the fluid cushion).
My wife started having headaches, and we asked the nurse to get a doctor/anesthesiologist to come check her out. An anesthesiologist comes in and talks to us and says that she probably has a very light case of it (which turned out to be the case) and told her to drink caffeinated soda. It took him 3 minutes to discuss it. Dude didn't even walk all the way in the room - stood near the door the whole time and then left. When we got the statements from the insurance company, it turned out the dude had charged $300 for the three minute "consult"! Total BS... I used to feel sorry for docs in general for getting squeezed by insurance companies (malpractice insurance, HMO contracts, etc.) until I saw that.
It's become a war between the physicians and the insurance industries - elevating the stakes over and over again, forgetting that us peons aren't making enough money to cover the increasing premiums.
Some are born to move the world, to live their fantasies... Neil Peart
For some time, credit card issuers have made almost all of their profit on late charges. The interest primarily pays off fraud losses.
I know of one large issuer which has processing centers in many states. It intentionally mails its bills from the one with the longest average snail-mail delivery to your address (a friend of mine was in the meeting where this strategy was hatched at that company). Credit card companies have also greatly increased their late fees (they used to be trivial) and a late payment will usually cause any interest rate deal that you had to disappear, with your rate going very high.
In the good old days, paying your credit card bills on time was the best way to have good credit. Today, credit card companies prefer people who pay late, but always pay, and also those who keep big balances on the cards. Pay your card late and watch the increase in credit card solicitations in your mailbox!
I have a couple of cards that account for almost all my credit card usage. I use automatic electronic payments monthly out to eternity to those cards... payments exceeding the minimum payment expected. This avoids any late payment charges (and the loss of my mileage points) should I not get around to processing the bill and sending in the full payment in time.
The only good weather is bad weather.
I used to work for MCI as a analyst. My job was to "fix" problems in the billing systems. If an issue was over $20,000 then we would consider resolving it. On several occasions, I came across unreported problems that were costing the customer more money than advertised, and I was told that we' "only resolve issue that are brought to us by customer complaint." Also, if an issue impacted more customers than the complaining customer, no refund was granted, except to the customer that complained. 99% of the issues I was assigned had one complaintant, but impacte 100's if not 1,000's of additional MCI customers.
One issue that sticks out in my mind dealt with the personal 800 service users being charged international rates for a domestic call. Someone forgot the jump in a nested loop. Oops. That COBOL can be trickey. lol.
Gerald Roebke
When I saw the headline of this posting, I was hoping that the article would be about the Federal Reserve Bank. What a disappointment.
The Fed has been printing money like mad, for several years now. This is inflation, big time. The published rate of inflation is below 2% per annum, but this is deceiving. Consider an example: an electric table saw.
Perhaps its price has barely changed in the last two years. Is this an example of low inflation? No. The price changed only a little, but the table saw changed a lot. Two years ago, most of the manufacturing that went into the table saw was performed in the U.S. or Japan, or possibly Taiwan. Today, most of the manufacturing took place in China. The cost of this production decreased dramatically. The price did not. Where did the difference go? Was it turned into profit? Doubtful. Except for markets where a monopoly exists, profits are constrained by competition.
A similar story has developed for services. Consider an insurance policy, a home equity loan, or the interpretation of your last mammogram. Over the past several years, all three of these services became much cheaper to provide, due to offshoring. The labor used to provide these services gradually moved to India. The phone support, the analysis of creditworthiness, the medical transcription, the inspection of X-ray images, all of this (and much more) is steadily moving overseas.
The price, in dollars, of these goods and services has not changed much. The nature of these goods and services has changed tremendously. How is this possible? It's because the government has been printing money like crazy. It's not easy to figure out how much new money is being created. For some reason, newspapers love to report changes in the interest rates controlled by the Fed. They even report rumors of future changes in this rate. The byproduct of these rate manipulations is usually an increase in the money supply, and this information is rarely reported. If mentioned at all, it is in the form of an aside to a more "important" development. I've seen figures ranging from 6% per annum to 12% per annum. I don't know what the true figure is. But I do know that prices on goods and services should be in free fall right now. This, because every month, more of these goods and services are being produced by dirt cheap overseas labor.
We're enduring lower pay and more frequent spells of unemployment, due to offshoring. We're being denied the benefits of cheaper foreign-made goods and services, due to the Fed.
I can agree with a lot of the thoughts on this subject, but people are leaving out a Very Big part of the equation.
Say you're Joe Average. Your family salary is average (say $60,000 a year, combined), with 2.5 kids and a dog.
Joe Average needs a Coronary bypass which conservatively costs $200,000.
Without insurance, Joe Average is dead. With insuance, his outlay is something between $0 and $5000.
Sounds like Joe just won the Lottery. As stated before, my twins and their complicated pregnancy probably would have cost me half amillion dollars out of pocket. As it is, it didn't cost a dime. (well, _maybe_ $200 in co-pays.)
So, Half a million for the birth of two healthy boys. How much has my family paid into insurance? A helluva lot less than that. Perhaps $12,000 over the last 5-10 years.
It's not the annual checkups the insuance covers for you, it's the absolute destruction of all past and future income.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I am married and my wife raises the kids and manages the home. She also does the bills. We try to do as much electronic commerce as we can, and pay our bills online. Since she knows very well what our expenses ought to be, and has access to detailed statements online and time to go over them, she finds things constantly. Mostly it is just random stuff where you say "wtf?" and make a phone call to get your bill adjusted. But we had a real dust-up with [cell phone service starting with S] over our family cell phone plan, where they were charging us hundreds of dollars extra on our phone bill for months on end. Every month we knew we would have to call them to get $100-$400 worth of charges removed, 8 hour calls to places we never even heard of, totally off the wall. Finally they "fixed" it and we have not been troubled for over a year. If we had not annoyed them so furiously for most of a year before, would our billing ever have straightened itself out? Not on your life! But what in the world actually *changed* in their system to shield us from bogosity I could not tell you!
I am dead certain that most (if not all) [cell phone service starting with S] customers are being overbilled on their mobile phone usage just as we were, and I suppose [cell phone service starting with S] spends a lot of time adjusting bills. There must be some really horrendous software blackhole in their billing system that gravitationally slings stray phone charges all over the database like so many loose asteriods.
Why we sucked up so many nasty stray bits remains a mystery. Were they testing us because we were new with a one year lockin? Rather more a mystery is how it stopped. I can tell you *why* it stopped, and it was because of my wife. So they have control of some kind, which they exercise at need.
What makes you reach for the tinfoil hat is the thought that maybe they don't "fix" the problem at the core because as a business matter it makes them money. Someone did the math and elected to a) invest less in expensive engineers doing process debugging, b) spend a little hiring low-paid phone jockies in Nevada to debate billing issues with irate customers, and 3) scrape off whatever is not adjusted as easy money.
It is the lure of easy money, and avoidance of hard work, that creates this nonsense. Now that we have transferable mobile numbers let's see how long it takes service providers to clean up their act. And, let's see if honest billing impacts the bottom line.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
The worst practice I've come across is double billing. I got hit with this one around February and March, as the power was deregulated. Around that time, the price of electricity was also capped after some people had a very hard time with soaring electrical bills.
The cap goes into action, and I get a bill that is about double what I expect. When I look over it, I realize that I've been billed twice for the same electricity. I complain about it, and I'm told that it was a mistake because of the cap, and that it will be credited to my next bill.
The next bill comes, and the charge is still there, and earning interest. I'm now at the point of having to manually calculate my bills (partially because when the cap went into effect, the utilities company took about three months to adjust their billing system), complaining every couple of months, and even writing the occasional letter regarding these errors.
And then, in October, I get a notice that because of my debit, I have to pay what I owe ASAP or they will require a deposit. Let's just say I didn't take this well. After calming down, I wrote them a polite letter where I pointed out that you cannot bill somebody twice for the same electricity, enclosed a copy of the bill where the mistake first appeared, and requested a meeting within two days.
The bill was corrected the next day, and both the double billing and the interest it had accrued were removed. I swear, though, if they had charged me a deposit fee, I would have gone to my lawyer and sued their asses. Nobody screws around with me like that and gets away with it.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Very nice place, it had to be said. The room - well, suite - I was staying in was the size of my flat back home.
The problems came when it was time to check out. Although Warners were paying the basic expenses, additional ones (phone calls, room service, etc) were expected to be covered by us.
Now, I hadn't touched the minibar (there was a convenience store just down the street for booze and snacks), the premium cable had been left alone because Warners had taken me out every night, I had no girlfriend (hey, I'm a /. reader!) so there hadn't been any phone calls, I hadn't made any calls for room service, I hadn't connected my laptop to the internet, I hadn't thrown the TV out of the window or taken a big shit in the middle of the living room requiring special cleaning... hell, I even left a decent tip.
Go to reception to check out? I'm handed a bill for $95 dollars of assorted 'additional services'.
Needless to say, I went ballistic and all the charges magically vanished. But it was a lesson in how places like that operate. They obviously assume that guests have all their expenses met by somebody else, so couldn't care less if a wodge of charges are added to the bill.
Now, I know that if I'd presented those expenses to *my* employer expecting them to be paid, they would have laughed in my face and told me to fuck off...
You must think in Russian.
Household Bank, a major player in the screw-the-poor subprime market, has been caught for this kind of thing. But I've heard stories of even worse.
A friend of mine is a financial planner, and now whistleblower. She's brought several of these sleazy operators into court and won.
A couple of her clients with recent bankruptcies have Household Bank credit cards. They're always having problems with web payments or automatic debits going through, being assessed usurous late fees, and then overlimit fees when the late fees put them over their suddenly-lowered limit. My friend suspects these "problems" are carefully programmed into the system, and has been gathering evidence to support this. So if anyone from Household is reading, we're on to you!