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T-Mobile Backs Off Plan To Charge $1.50 For Paper Bills
netbuzz writes "Following a torrent of customer complaints, bad publicity and the threat of a class-action lawsuit, T-Mobile has abandoned a plan announced this summer to charge any customer wanting a paper bill $1.50 per month. While the news is being cheered by many T-Mobile customers, it's not going to be as popular with others who praised the extra fee as an environmentally sound inducement to reduce paper use."
They could do just the opposite and give people a $1.50 reduction in their bill if they opt-in to a paperless billing system.
I personally like paper bills... It helps me keep track of when I've PAID those bills...
I doubt that they would have gotten the same reaction if they had offered a $1.50 discount to customers agreeing to receive electronic bills.
When I read things like this I often wonder if the people promoting these environmentally friendly business processes are actually not that environmentally friendly and instead simply motivated by greed. The problem I see is that average (you know, 100 IQ etc.) people are too stupid to realize the business hippy just wants more of their money, and have discovered that using politically correct buzzwords has a calming and mesmerizing effect on the cattle...
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
While I understand the environmental argument, paper bills make for accountability. With online-only billing, you have no way to resolve certain account disputes, because they hold all the data! I'm not putting on my tinfoil hat and saying they'll deliberately screw up the records and double bill you - but mistakes do happen. Having a paper trail is the best way to protect yourself from mistakes. Also, consider this: what happens to your account when you close it? How can you prove that you had the account once it's closed if it's online-only? With a paper trail, you can prove it! (This applies more to banks than cell phones...)
It doesn't seem that surprising - charging for paper bills is pretty common practice in the UK now.
Give a "$1.50 a month Discount" to all customers asking to not have a paper bill sent.
This goes over very well if you give a discount instead of trying to boost your profit margin.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm all for reducing waste and saving the environment, but so often it seems that the best way to make money off of customers is to invent some kind of 'environment' related fee.. if you are against it, you must not care about the environment! Nevermind the profit.. Pay your $0.25 per plastic bag, and save the environment at the same time by donating $0.245 to the chain *cough* environment.. (Maybe I'm getting a little bitter in my old age here.)
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
If T-mobile bills are anything like the ones in my post they could reduce paper by condensing the bills to just one page and stop including fliers to sell me more products. I suspect however, that this was more about another adding another charge and not about actually saving money.
There has been a law passed in my area that charges a few cents for plastic shopping bags. The assumption was that the charge would somehow go to bettering the environment. Instead it goes into the retailer's pocket. Revenue by legislation. Glad I use bins.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Seriously. Speakeasy has been doing this for at least the last five or six years, at least with their home service, and nobody's pissing and moaning and calling them evil.
I tried to go paperless with T-Mobile a few months ago and they keep sending me paper bills any way. Is this just to get an extra $1.50 out of me every month? Oh, and if you go paperless you have to agree to have automatic debit from your checking account...make sure you read that part of the fine print.
"Following a torrent of customer complaints" Is that torrent available on the Pirate Bay? I have been unable to find it anywhere.
Here in Finland most mobile & broadband operators charge for the bill. Manual, email and electronic bills are free. There were some outbreaks when the first one did it, but it was eventually accepted (and got a lot of people using electronic billing). Personally, I prefer the electronic billing as you can't lose bills when you get them directly to your bank account.
You know how much paper I toss in the trash at work. This e-bill shit is just that, shit. They save money on stamps and use the excuse of "saving the trees". This environment propaganda makes me sick, and I am sick of seeing it everywhere.
Many people I know dont have a computer or dont know how to use them. Its good to hear consumers drag down to reality executives that are far away from reality or simply don't care about everyone. Sadly I know the decision to enforce $1.50 paper bill charge and then back off of it was a financial one and not humanitarian one...
Worse than that--instead of issuing signed PDFS, they'd probably do the same thing most online companies do, and either:
1) have some god awful non-platform agnostic flash application. I'm sorry--if it's for billing purposes, you need to support *MY* computer. I don't accept the notion of any software requirement to get my trash picked up, or pay for the phone bill on my plain old only does phone calls and SMS cellphone.
2) Use unsigned HTML--in which case I'll print it out anyway, as it's my understanding I need papercopies to comply with tax law. Thanks environmentalists--you've just made me use my own printer, with toner that's probably a worse impact on the environment than whatever they use at their billing facility. But that's okay... because...
most people won't even understand what it would mean to digitally sign a statement (so nobody implements it)... therefore stops me from hitting "view source"--changing my displayed bill from $125 to $25, saving the html, hitting print, and cutting them a check for $25?
Next week when they complain, I underpaid--I send them a copy of my perfectly legitimate bill for $25, and tell them that *they* have a computer error. Since I'm the only one with a paper trail, it's pretty much their error by definition. Every one of their backups says $125? Okay--but I'm still the only person with a legitimate paper trail...
Sorry--paper is out there for a reason.
Companies always pass it off as being "green", but that's not the real reason. T-mobile stores are still overly-lit, selling merchandise that's over-packaged, and handing out paper fliers.
The truth is that its expensive to print bills. And I don't blame them for wanting to get rid of them, but if you're going to save money, then pass a little of it on to me.
My bank just paid me $5 to go to e-bills and for me, that was enough.
Carrot vs. Stick
This has been standard in Europe for a very long time, and all the carriers are doing it. T-Com once even offered a 10 EUR incentive for everyone switching their landline billing to online-only. I've been getting my bills on the web for *years*.
I wanna know whose idea was this RIGHT NOW.
If they want me to pay electronically, can I charge them 1.50 for the added risk of electronic commerce? It's one thing to put your check routing number in a paper envelope and sent it by US mail. it's a whole nother level of trust to send it over the internet and rely on their databases to be properly secured. Look at all the whole sale breeches.
Speaking as a victim of identity theft, Personally, my own weighing of the risks is that I wont do electronic commerce other than insured visa cards until the laws are changed to make it their responsibility if they lose my bank account information. When that happens my expectation will be that they will pay the proper attention to security and it will be safer than mailing checks.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I use a very large, very old credit union and they started charging existing customers $0.50/statement for paper statements in the last year or two.
For the past several years they've been doing this for existing accounts.
Until the industry comes out with an e-statement that will hold up in court as well as a paper statement, I'll stick to dead tree form thank you very much.
Just posted a couple days ago on the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2009/09/10/nl-bell-twoonie-fee-910.html $2 for paper bills. We could fight it I guess, but no one will, and it's not like it'd do anything anyway :(
Yeah, in my country (Holland, Europe), the bank 'ING' is planning to let people pay for the monthly paper bank statements that list the transactions to/from your account for that month. The given reason is that 'anyone has the easy alternative of easily looking into and print out the transactions online via the web site'. Maybe we should just threaten them with a lawsuit as well.
no sudden outbreak tag?
I'd be curious about the relative green-ness of electronic versus paper bill paying.
you used how many watts of energy to have your computer on, to have your screen on, to have the modem on, and then all the downstream electronics from your house, compared to the energy it needed to produce, deliver and process the bill.
A paper bill is a legal document. An online bill carries no legal power whatsoever, leaving the account holder with no rights other than what the company wants the account holder to have.
They could have just given those who go paperless a $1.50 credit, and then in a years time raise the plan rates by $1.50
Why is it that companies do the stupid thing in an invisible, underhanded way, and the smart things in a way most likely to prompt a customer backlash?
Because paper bills are unnecessary now,
and are therefore an unjustifiable environmental cost,
the government should charge a "sin tax" on such unnecessary
paperwork. The tax could then be passed on to the consumer,
who of course has the option to turn off their paper bills and
save the tax.
I know you Americans don't like government very much,
but this might be a nice extra revenue that could be put to use
for other environmentally beneficial programs.
Tax shifting is the way to go. Increase environmental sin taxes,
and decrease income tax to compensate if you feel strongly that
it should be revenue neutral. The Green Party has been advocating
this for 25 years, and we're tired of being so far ahead. Catch up
please. Steal our policy and call it your own!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Who is the bloody stupid PHB who came up with this? If you want people to accept non-paper bills, you don't charge them $1.50 to continue to receive paper bills. What you do is give them a $1.50 discount (or some other incentive) to get the electronic bill instead.
Be sure to print "-$1.50 Green Discount" on the bill too. The fools will love you for it. In fact, they may not even notice when you raise their fees $3.00 six months later.
Proverbs 21:19
I might actually care what they were saying if they weren't already nickel-and-diming me with little fees. I understand why they don't include taxes in the quoted price (I think that's state law, for most things other than fuel the sales tax *has* to be itemized separately) but they stick in a bunch of other fees that *aren't* taxes but somehow they feel OK pretending that the quoted price is real. (Yes I know all the other cell companies do it too but that doesn't make it OK.) So I don't believe for a second that the $1.50 is anything other than yet another cash grab.
It doesn't help that T-Mobile is so awful. I've had them (and their predecessors Voicestream and Omnipoint) for over ten years (only because I refuse to sign a contract, and Sprint PCS and Virgin Mobile had even worse quality), and I can't think of *anywhere* that used to have no coverage but now does. Do they EVER put up new towers? Where I live now, I have to drive into town just to check my voice mail. LOTS of dropped calls everywhere else (including interstates). Anyway an extra $1.50 a month would be enough to remind me that crappy cell phone service is something I don't really need in the first place.
I mean really. Is it that hard to figure out? OK, so maybe you don't raise prices for six months and just eat it for that period. People think of paper bills as a necessity, not a luxury. You charge for luxuries but offer discounts to remove a necessity. Everyone is happy that way.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Why not allow customers to download or get emailed a digitally signed pdf copy of the statement or bill.
I hate that. But only because they get it wrong. O2 do that with the iphone accounts and you cannot get them to change it. I used my iphone for business and have to save the bills so I left them. I wouldn't have a problem if they simply gave you the option to receive the bills as pdf's via email, so the amount of work I have to save them is to just push a button. That would then be preferable to paper bills, however, forcing you to login and navigate their website and download them and if you forget one month do more work is just too much trouble to stay with the provider, so I left them for a provider which did provide paper bills.
Why can't they just get it right? It's not rocket science.
The lesson here is that you once people get used to something, it's very hard to change. People are used to free paper bills, so they're going to put up a fight when T-Mobile tries to change that. On the other hand, people are used to being gouged on the pricing of text messaging, so they don't put up enough of a fight to get that changed.
The text message pricing is far more offensive, but it's not new. And besides, if you don't like it, where else are you going to go? So much for free market competition.
I never understood the "save a tree" crap.
They farm trees for paper, the same way they farm wheat for bread.
If I don't eat a slice of bread no one commends me for saving a stalk of wheat.
Yeah, I know there are other things that are environmental problems besides growing the trees, but it was "saving the trees" that was the root cause of this "don't use paper" admonition.
Environmentalism causes a lot of superstitious behaviour.
Nextel / Sprint has been charging for a paper bill for a while now (a year or two at least). T-Mobile must cater to a different crowd.
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
I don't own a computer or have access to the internet, you insensitive clod!
With Telenor and TeliaSonera (large swedish mobile carriers) amongst others here in Sweden you can get e-bills instead right into your online bank. So the $1.50USD is less then what I would pay for a paper bill which is $2.9USD by todays currency market (I checked google) and we don't get that much complaints about it. So I can't understand why the US can't have this too. E-bills is the way to go, easier to pay the bills if you already use online banking, but then again online banking is probably more common in a small country like Sweden then in USA.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just curious - how do they do this? Do they send you a checksum? My online back statement are just plain old PDFs.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Back about a year ago, I remember T-Mobile stating that come (I believe) December '08, if I hadn't called to orally communicate my desire to continue receiving a paper bill, I'd automatically be switched to paperless, and on top of that, if I wanted to receive paper after that point, I'd have to pay a fee.
T-Mobile should give an option to discount existing fees to go green. And stop sending me inserts in my bill every month about contests and phones I don't want.
I read the on-line announcement days before it was to go into effect. I was appalled. There wasn't just one fee, but 2 separate ones.
Fee 1: Paper Bill with no details would cost the consumer $1.50 per bill.
Fee 2: Paper Bill with full detaila would cost and extra $1.99 per bill.
While it was available to opt out on their website and receive the e-bill, even then it wasn't an email or something kind like that. It was an email that basically stated your bill is ready. If you wanted details you had to go to T-Mobile and pull up your account just to look at your bill. Even now they aren't very detailed on their webpage, by my standards.
I personally use paper bills especially when something important has to be documented. While I'm tech savy, I don't appreciate being forced into options that aren't good for the customer. Had they promoted things differently or had diminished the cost to something way more reasonable I probably would not have been appalled by the Fees they were about to impose. But knowing that there are people who still don't use a PC or the internet, and only use a cell for emergencies, that really raised my eyebrows.
When I called today, because their on-line description of my account usage was confusing, that is when they told me that the fees have been nixed.
T-Mobile almost lost me as a customer with that move. They need to improve their customer service reputation that they've now hurt and they need to make their web site's account management and display of billing information more clear and concise.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Exactly.
I'm going to be leaving T-Mobile UK shortly, because they overcharged me for several months having screwed up a transfer to a new package, and then had the audacity to accuse me of lying because I didn't notice the small amount in question immediately. (There is now way that any reasonable person with my usage history would have asked for the combination of facilities they claim I did: it was basically the new package plus part of my old package providing essentially the same service that they hadn't cancelled properly.)
In this case, it's not really worth chasing them for the small amount of money concerned, I'll just take satisfaction in voting with my wallet. However, having the itemised, printed bills from them would certainly have been useful had it been worth going to court over.
Also, it's interesting that they told me a few years back that they wanted to stop sending me itemised bills, immediately after I'd caught them overcharging me using the itemisation just the previous month. They do charge for itemisation, which I rather resent, since they demonstrably aren't trustworthy to charge me a varying sum of money each month without explaining where it comes from.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Mail me your paper-bills, I'll scan them and email them to you (they dont even email them to you). Charge is $5 per bill and that will save the environment even more because the price is higher!
What I hate, is when my bills come VIA EMAIL. That is highly insecure. I'm not naming any names on this, but a few businesses I've done business with will charge a fee if you don't go paperless, and then they send all your transactions to you via plain text email.
That is bad. Very bad. I much prefer the "Your statement is ready, click here" and you have to login.
I think it'd be awesome if some of these companies would send this stuff to you via PGP, but alas too much of the population sucks for them to ever care to use that.
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
If they're going to institute a change in contract terms, you should be able to get out of your contract.
None of this class action nonsense, pick up and GTFO. /Former t-mob customer, who left after his onerous 2 yr contract with a horrid WinMob phone finally ended //Likely will never go back
Here in England, mobile company Orange has been charging for paper bills for a while now.
The transition happened with little or no notice for me (my account still being at my parents house, I never read the bills, so I can't say 100% that they notified me) which is rather annoying, but it was worse for my partner.
She recieved an SMS from them to say they would start charging for paper bills (statement still comes free) and there was an option to opt-out (from a non-spam source) which she did.
lo and behold, full paper bills still came, with a charge, that wasn't refunded.
Worse still (if only a shade off-topic), they've been charging for delivery reports for 3 years, making their "free unlimited texts" rather dubious. I know not everyone uses them, but it's a bugger for me, as often I need to know the message has arrived!
I know there's a Hell, I've worked in retail.
We're not talking about the rights of the company. We are talking about the rights of the account holder.
If you don't have a paper bill, it may be in some cases difficult to assert any rights you have concerning mistakes in the bill.
Exactly. It takes a LOT of time to download those bills. Banks like Chase have VERY slow web sites; they apparently don't want to buy enough computer equipment.
It's common that the Chase web site times out before a page loads. Complaining to the company has exactly no effect. In the U.S., a big bank or telephone company can do anything it likes.
You do know email is not secure, right?
The real reason is that going to their web site is probably a hassle, or when sending out bills by email, people will neglect to check their email. This would result in a shit load of late fees for T-Mobile.
In the mean time Fido (a Rogers subsidiary, in Canada) is charging 2$ for this without anyone complaining! :P
(well yes, we live in a monopolistic telecommunication regime, you'd probably get shot...! )
Here in Australia there's a $2.20 fee for paying in cash at the telcom office!
If they had better coverage, they could charge for the paper bill.
They make it very hard to then send in a payment using your usual bank bill pay. You have to setup a T-Mobile bill pay. Which them means it is very easy for users to not see their bills because "it just gets paid".
I want all of my bills to come from my single pay interface with my bank. Simple as that. Having to configure bill-pay with each and every company I owe money to is pure stupidity. Simple as that.
No one is saying that no contract exists. We are just saying that you can't prove anything to a court unless you get a paper bill. What you saved to your computer could have been made by anyone.
One simple reason:
Thanks to spam, and the refusal of ISPs to take action about spam, email is not reliable enough for documents like this.
When Level3 stops hosting the five or six consistent 24/7 spammers I've been complaining to them about for the last year straight, and my spam load is otherwise improved enough that the filters can be scaled back and I can still get work done, I'll think about electronic statements. Right now, email is simply not reliable enough. (And no, I can't count on whitelisting, because I can't trust companies like T-Mobile to send their own mail from a consistent address and host -- and if they use an ESP, they may well use one which has a history of spam, and gets filtered.)
This is a cost-of-spam issue. When spam stops imposing huge risks of lost information, I think email will be a great choice for things like this, and I'll sign up for them. That hasn't happened yet.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
What happens if I leave T-Mobile and am no longer a customer? Do they keep my account enabled for seven years so I can view my old online bills? Or do I have to call an operator answer a gazillion questions and then get charged for paper copies?
Does the IRS accept printed copies of the bills as valid receipts?
And how do we know that T-Mobile has not changed the electronic records?
Questions, questions, questions
RLH
My problem with electronic bills is that they cut off my access to them very quickly. If I get a paper bill, I can have it forever. With electronic bills, I have 3 months to 3 years (depending on the firm) to view it or its gone forever (or maybe gone without paying a recovery fee). I understand hard drives cost money, but one hell of a lot less than stamps. The IRS often requires information up to 7 years old, so I need to have access to my bills for at least that period of time. I am not going to bother downloading the bill each month. If it comes as an attachment, I'm fine with that too, can just put it in an electronic filing cabinet each month. Or at least send me an annual statement at the end of the year I can keep for the long term or something.
1. machines to open the envelopes
2. machines to scan the coupon and the check (also the size of pickup trucks)
3. people to deal with all the assholes who send in jack chick booklets with their phone payment, people who staple their checks to their coupon, people who drop it in the mud, etc
4. data entry/software to transfer the analog paper back into digital form, and quality control for that as well
5. machine to sort the checks and sned them back to originating banks.
electronics would be much better. the only problem is you put tens of thousands of people out of work, and even if they all magically got IT degrees overnight, there wouldnt be any jobs for them to do. they wind up working for $7/hour at yet another fast food place so the ever shrinking percentage of people who run the machines can go somewhere else on their lunch break, dinner break, breakfast coffee stop, etc.
trust me, ask the people who work at the grocery store, starbucks, etc, how many of them have college degrees. in accounting, finance, biology, IT, it doesnt matter.
efficiency is great and all... but when you have hordes of people who are making starvation wages and have no health care, you kind of start to have some serious social problems. the answer? i dont know the fucking answer. but if we spent more time thinking about it, instead of how to render zombies with 16-way SMP physics accelerated GPUs, maybe we would have some solution by now instead of screaming at each other on talk radio.
let me assure you... a room full of mail processing machines hooked up to 220V power lines with circuit breakers the size of a baby.... that have to be left on 24/7 because their ancient design makes no room for a 'sleep mode'.... well... i dont know.
you gotta figure... 30,000 people spending 30 seconds paying a bill on 30,000 PCs that would be on anyways....
vs
30,000 people having paper bills printed by machines, stuffed into envelopes by machines, scanned and sorted by the post office by machines, opened by machines at the processing center, separated by machines, scanned by machines into yet another computer system... oh yeah.. did i mention how they shred all that paper in... another machine?
i think the Payments via PC is a marginal cost... built on a system that people are using to play games and do email and surf porn... the only problem is fraud (on company side, and consumer side) but they seem to have solved that in europe. the only reason for the US to stay on that track is sheer status quoism.... which the US seems good at lately...
When you down load from the bank website the connection is SSL encrypted.
But if you email a pdf anyone on the internet could be reading it.
around here most companies want something equivalent to about 8usd extra a month of you want a paper bill _or_ don't sign up for _automatic_ online payment. with automatic payment you still get all the specifics of a normal bill, it is just on bank statement instead, which is online.
recently one company introduced a ~1.5usd charge for paying the bill, regardless of how you pay, that didn't go too well with their customers
a) Send encrypted, digitally signed pdfs, provide the passcode via logging in once with https
Fails the mom test. I can't wait to get the phone call to explain this to my parents. ("Honey? Is this attachment safe? Why is it asking me for a password? I don't know any password. I don't like this. What's wrong with a paper bill.... etc. etc.)
I want some protection in case of another incident like the time the gas company accidentally billed me $8000. If that had been set up for direct withdrawl, my rent check and three other utility checks would have bounced before I got the charge reversed, and I'd still be fighting to get it off my credit record.
This is exactly the reason that I allow no direct debit of bills. Some I have charged to a credit card which I can dispute and pay (or not) in the event of an error but they don't get any cash from me directly without me explicitly authorizing it. I'm an accountant and I've seen more than enough screwed up bills to think auto debit is a horrible idea most of the time.
The reason I mostly insist on paper bills still fundamentally that I have to go find the bill instead of the bill coming to me. Each vendor I deal with does it differently and I have zero interest in logging on to a half dozen different websites, each with their own password and interface to find out the amount of the bill. With a paper bill, the bill comes to me instead of me going to the bill. If they want to deliver an ecrypted pdf in the format *I* want, then I'll be happy to receive electronic statements. Ideally I could download the pdf directly into Quicken.
is to sue a drop daed easy to use online system, and advocate it heavily. People will move if it's easier and trusted.
I should go to a simple website, be able to pay either with a reoccurring account or monthly, look at a bill and be able to look at that bill again in 10 years.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Frontier Communications in Northeastern Arizona began charging me $2.00 per paper statement. I suppose they think I enjoy bending over and getting screwed but the truth is that I value my paper statements more.
My provider, a regional cell-phone company MetroPCS already charges $2.00 USD for a paper bill.
What is this I hear about a class-action law suit?
--User0x45
My gas and utility companies charge a $1-$1.50 "convenience fee" to pay online. Why I'd want to pay for the hassle of using their awful online sites is beyond me. With a mailing, I merely pay $0.44 for the stamp, and have the added bonus of not exposing my credit card number to interception online.
The gas company also periodically sends mailings about how you can read your own meter yourself. If they want to reduce the outrageous $9.75 customer fee per month, I might consider reading my own meter. Ditto for eliminating the physical mailing.
And then there's automatic bill payment. I'm sure I'd have to pay a convenience fee for that, despite the fact that this makes it more likely to overdraw my account. With a paper bill, I know when the money is being withdrawn, and can delay it if money is tight for that month (sure, I might pay a few-dollar late fee, but that beats $25+ for an insufficient funds fee).
I have T-Moble and it was my intention to cancel my service and go to AT&T with the first charge for a paper bill. I don't bother complaining about such things. Time and energy are limited. I just act. Same with credit cards. No man is an island and the complainers are just the tip of the iceberg. Sqreater
E Proelio Veritas.
"However, practically speaking very few people want to legally dispute small bills (like their phone bill)..."
Suppose you want to dispute an illegal charge that you noticed only after a year? That could be a lot of money.
I have OFTEN discovered and disputed sneaky charges on my telephone bill. Our local telephone company is 100% dishonest in the sense that it will try anything sneaky that makes more profit, in my opinion.
What is in the law and what actually happens may be two different things.
Paper is a renewable resource. I'd bet the vast majority comes from tree farms any more and I don't think going paperless is actually saving forests anymore.
While a lot of people won't understand, I don't trust online banking. One hacker and all your info and money is gone. And banks don't care. The burden will be on you to get them to credit your account. Been there, done that. Don't need the hassle.
Not to mention the hassle of change email addresses for all your legal matters. Miss one email and the penalties are bigger than $18 you'll save in a year's time.
JMO.. YMMV
The trees are grown for that purpose
Young trees soak up more CO2 than old ones.
I guess there is the chemicals used to create the paper argument.
I work in a company, who is, amongst all, into weather monitoring systems.
So there are like 50 automatic weather stations all over the region, most running off batteries (normal or solar), each sending about a kilobyte of data collected over the last hour, every hour, over GSM. They run a telemetric tariff billed PLN0.01/each 10kB ($0.003) or each started connection. They can't keep the connections running because of limited battery capacity - they need to reconnect every time.
And each month we get about 300 pages of paper billings filled with entries like
17.09.2009 15:48 | outgoing data | 1kB | PLN0.01
17.09.2009 15:48 | incoming data | 1kB | PLN0.01
17.09.2009 16:48 | outgoing data | 1kB | PLN0.01
17.09.2009 16:48 | incoming data | 1kB | PLN0.01
17.09.2009 17:48 | outgoing data | 1kB | PLN0.01
17.09.2009 17:48 | incoming data | 1kB | PLN0.01
with about 700 such entries per each station.
We can ask for electronic invoices but billings are only paper.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2