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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."
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
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.
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.
Well what's the difference really? They could say that the bill is $50 and you have to pay an extra $1.50 for a paper bill, or they could say the bill is $51.50 and you get a $1.50 discount for not receiving paper bills. Same thing.
Not the same thing at all.
For one thing, most utilities have either fixed profit margins or fixed rate schedules. They can't just raise everyone's bill by $1.50 and "offer" to reduce it for playing ball. Whether or not they can charge more for the "value added" service of sending you a bill remains something of a grey area, however, at least until enough of them get spanked by their local PUC for trying crap like this.
Second, many monthly services have various taxes associated with the underlying service itsef - So making me pay more for the service and taking it off after-the-fact means more taxes than paying less for the service with a "fee" for paper billing (this obviously wouldn't apply in the case of a straight bottom-line sales tax, but the sort of services this entire topic relates to generally don't pay taxes like that).
Finally - We-the-customers need to take a stand about the nonstop attempts by every company with whom we (have no choice but to) do business, trying to nickel-and-dime us to death. I would love to see some sort of regulation like what New York has for retail, where the company must show the real, actual, final, all-expenses-included price. None of this "39.95 per month plus taxes and fees and random nondescript lineitems, +/- whatever-we-like based on the length of your contract and what model of hardware you either own or rented, adjusted for how many seconds you use it per day per arbitrarily sliding time-windows with different fee structures". Just tell us the goddamned cost up-front. If you can't (or won't) do that, GTFO and make room for someone who will. Not a difference so much as a "stop quibbling about the details and grow a pair" - Just Say No(tm) to one more itsy bitsy fee and tell them where to stick the paper bill they no longer need to send to you, as an ex-customer.
And you know what, if T-Mobile offered to email a PDF of my bill every month, that would have been acceptable, but they did not. You had to log in and pull up your billing records. And if you want a PDF, you have to crank your own out. I'd much rather have the officialness of an email from T-Mobile with a PDF they created of my bill, than a PDF I cranked out myself. If a dispute ever arose, I know the PDF I generated will have no weight.