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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.