I just read an article about large companies that want to charge you for sending you your monthly bill. Yeah, get that! Can you imagine! They are graciously giving you a choice of either go paperless or we will charge you for billing you.
T-Mobile sent out letters to all of it's customers that receive their bills on paper, by regular mail, stating that from next month they will be charging you an additional $1.50 for a simple bill or $3.50 for an itemized bill, unless of course you decide to go paperless, in which case we won't charge you to bill you. Their reasoning behind it, is that it is more environmentally friendly to go paperless.
Now I'm not disputing the environmentally friendly point, even though any bills I get paperless, I still print out and therefore use paper, ink and electricity, not to mention space to store it, since the IRS requires that you keep a paper copy of all deductions on file for 7 years, what I'm really aggravated about it that these companies have the audacity to tell me that it is costing them money to send me a bill that I have the right to receive before I pay and then to hide their greed behind the environment.
They didn't give a rat's ass about the environment when they are sending out all of the junk mail soliciting my business. And why now are they touting that it is costing them money to mail me a bill. Surely this overhead cost was factored in when they figured up what they would charge for services. Surely the total cost to mail me my bill was an amount that they didn't pay for out of their own pocket. I'm sure that I have already been paying them to mail me the bill, as everyone else is but now they want to charge me again.
And for all the money that they are going to collect from these charges, are they going to turn it over to some environmentally friendly organization that will use it in order to protect the environment that this money is in honor off or are they going to take it to further line their pockets and boost their profits.
Maybe they should turn some of this money over to the federal postal service so that they won't have to close more post offices and cut more jobs only to have our postal rates raised again because these companies are too greedy to mail us our bill and thereby keep money pumping through the postal service.
What about all of the people that don't have internet service or don't trust the internet with personal information, they are more concerned about identity theft. Are they all forced to pay this additional fee, just so that they can pay their bill? Surely we are entitled to have our bill itemized so that we know exactly what we are paying for. It's not like T-mobile or any of the major phone carriers make a habit out of making sure their bills are correct. Mistakes on these types of bills are common but now we have to pay an additional $2.00 on top of the $1.50 they already want to charge us just so that we can check their mistakes for them on an itemized bill.
The reason there is not more outrage about this is because the people that this is really going to affect are the very ones that don't have internet access and therefore can't write blogs like this. So to all you none internet users we're looking out for you. I'm sure that everyone reading this post knows at least 5 people who do not use the internet to receive or pay bills, in fact they may not use it at all. That works out to be $3.50 per person by five people $17.50. you do the math, that's a whole lot of money for not providing you with your right to get an itemized bill for a service you have to pay.
Also, a legal question. Wouldn't this be a breach of contract and therefore if you didn't like it, you could walk out of it without penalty.
I had heard that some companies are offering a discount if you went paperless. Now that makes a whole lot more sense. I think I just might have to pay them a visit.
Oh and while we're on the subject, I wonder when these money hungry companies decide that they will charge us for mailing in a check and not paying it by automatic withdrawal of eft? I wonder!
Ok I'm done venting now, thanks!
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