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T-Mobile Backs Off Plan To Charge $1.50 For Paper Bills

Posted by timothy on from the just-send-me-a-pdf dept.

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."

24 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. Just reduce the bill by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Just reduce the bill by mrdoogee · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I came here to say this. Why not encourage environmentally friendly behavior, instead of punishing for adhering to the status quo.

    2. Re:Just reduce the bill by sakdoctor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And they could claw back the lost revenue by adding $1.50 onto everybody's bill!

    3. Re:Just reduce the bill by ironicsky · · Score: 4, Informative

      My bank does this. So does my cable company. $1.00 off if you don't get a bill.

      $0.54 cents a stamp
      +Paper
      +Envelop
      +Ink
      +Big massive industrial printer(I've seen the one the cable company uses, size of a pick up truck... The thing is brand spanking new out of the box)
      +People to refill the equipment and move the bills to the loading docks for Canada Post to come get it.

      All adds up quite quickly.

      I get the majority of my bills as PDF's now.

    4. Re:Just reduce the bill by theaveng · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I suggested a similar idea to a bunch of store-owners who were organizing to protest high credit card fees. They said the fees kept skyrocketing, and that meant increased prices, which would hurt the customers. I said if they want to help customers, encourage the shoppers to stop using credit cards by offering a 5% discount for cash payment.

      The store-owners looked at me as if I was nuts. You see they expected credit card companies to reduce fees, but heaven forbid the store owners reduce *their* fees to the customer. That's sacrilegious. Same with T-Mobile - heaven forbid they offer a discount for using paper. They want to collect MORE money not less.

      Aside-

      Discover Card gave me 5 dollars to go paperless. Eventually I decided I didn't like it because I kept forgetting to pay my bill (which ended-up costing me more than 5 dollars in late fees). So I went back to paper. Discover Card balked but when I said, "Give me paper or lose my business," they decided to give me paper statements again.

      --
      FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
    5. Re:Just reduce the bill by Smitty825 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'd love to go to a paper-less billing system...except for one thing...

      Why can't the companies just email me a PDF of the bill I normally receive? It would contain the due-date of the bill and how much I owe. If I am splitting the bill with roommates, then it's easy to forward to each other. If I want to keep a record of what I've been charged for, then it's easy for me to store it, etc.

      Currently the way "paperless" billing works is that I receive an email from saying my bill is ready to be seen. I then have to go to their website, enter my username/password (because they've written some sort of Javascript to prevent the browser from remembering it for me), click 3 or 4 times to find my bill and then discover that all of the information is located on 3 or 4 different pages.

      To me, the hassle of receiving a paperless bill isn't worth it...

      --

      Doh!
    6. Re:Just reduce the bill by spitzak · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Stores don't do that because it hurts impulse buying. If a customer goes in the store with $20 and a credit card, and sees something desirable for $100, but $95 with cash, they are likely to say "well I will come back when I have the cash" and then forget about the purchase entirely. But if there is no price penalty for the credit card then they will probably use the credit card right away.

    7. Re:Just reduce the bill by pla · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    8. Re:Just reduce the bill by Obfuscant · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Just set up autopay and you get both benefits.

      Yes, you get the benefit of not having a paper record of your bill to use for tax or other purposes, not having a reminder that a bill is due, having the vendor suck the money out of your account before you even know there is a problem with the last bill, and the fun of trying to get the money back when you prove they overcharged you for something.

      Like Comcast, which offered me a "delivered, no cost digital self-install kit" and then went ahead and charged me $10 for it anyway.

      Thanks, I think I'll keep the bill and pay after I see it is correct.

    9. Re:Just reduce the bill by CodeBuster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why can't the companies just email me a PDF of the bill I normally receive?

      If you had ever worked in web application development or computer security then you wouldn't be asking that question. Can you say phising? There are reasons why online banking and other financial institutions, for example, never use e-mail for account correspondence other than to inform you that your statement is ready for viewing without providing any links . The public Internet exists in a constant state of open warfare and any transaction involving money or billing is bound to be targeted by the bad guys. Could it be made secure? Possibly, but NOT in such a way that average users would (a) be able to set it up OR (b) be able to understand and use it properly.

    10. Re:Just reduce the bill by jbigboote · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    11. Re:Just reduce the bill by bzipitidoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Going automatic is a scary proposition, fraught with traps. Some fraudulent charge could land on my credit card and be automatically paid before I learn of it. Getting the money back is only one problem. If the charge is big enough, it could overdraw the bank account, and wouldn't the bank love that? Have fun arguing with the bank over the many penalty fees they'll gleefully charge as check after check bounces. Of course, not going automatic means I'm constantly flirting with exorbitant late fees as they play their little games to try to manipulate me into missing the due date. A popular one is to make the monthly due date creep forward, bouncing around a bit to make it less obvious. Over a year, I've had the due date creep from the 15th to the 6th of the month. I dumped that credit card. There's doing without any credit card, but that too is awkward.

      Some problems I've had with going paperless is it breaks down, and they don't email an actual statement but instead a mere notification that a new statement is ready for viewing on their website. Lot of rigamarole logging into email, finding the email, then logging into the website and finding the statement. Then it breaks down as sooner or later, I get a notice by snail mail saying they were unable to deliver the latest notification by email and are permanently switching me back to paper. Gets real old setting up paperless again and again.

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
  2. i like paper bills by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I personally like paper bills... It helps me keep track of when I've PAID those bills...

    1. Re:i like paper bills by azadrozny · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I use banking software, however I rely on those paper statements to tell me when exactly the bill is due, and how much. In the past I have opted into electronic statements, but there is no uniformity in how the statements are delivered. Sometimes I get a PDF emailed to me, but often just an email saying the bill is due, then I must login to find the date and amount. This is too inconsistent. I am waiting for the day when I can use my banking software to download a detailed statement from a single application, and then mark it for payment.

  3. discount by lapsed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Paper bills = accountability by stillnotelf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...)

  5. Dear T-Mobile... by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  6. Use less paper then by Neil+Watson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  7. Going paperless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. torrent by Haxzaw · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Following a torrent of customer complaints" Is that torrent available on the Pirate Bay? I have been unable to find it anywhere.

  9. Paper, Accountability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  10. I hate the lies by Lord+Byron+II · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  11. A paper bill is a legal document. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:A paper bill is a legal document. by CajunArson · · Score: 4, Informative

      A paper bill is a legal document. An online bill carries no legal power whatsoever

      Wrong. The rest of your post falls into irrelevance.

      For those of you who have never taken a Contract Law class, throw out the notion that documents have to be stamped and signed with fancy fonts on
      just the right kind of paper to be valid for normal business, that went out of style in the 19th century. Note that some other transactions that are not private contracts may still require notarization and other enhanced forms of evidence like a recording of title, but we are talking about online bills for normal services not transferring title to your house. The online record of your bill has exactly the same legal power as if the record were printed out onto a sheet of paper... in fact if there ever was a legal challenge over the accuracy of the bill, that is exactly what would happen, it would be printed out and submitted as evidence. The form of storage for the information contained in the bill has zero relevance to the legal rights and responsibilities of the parties. For those of you who've heard about the Statute of Frauds, any digital record held by your cable/cell/whatever provider is a "writing" just as if it was hand carved into a block of Italian marble.

      --
      AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.