T-Mobile Backs Off Plan To Charge $1.50 For Paper Bills 285
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."
Re:Just reduce the bill (Score:5, 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.
Going paperless (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 $1.50 out of me every month? Oh, and if you go paperless you have to agree to have automatic debit from your checking account...make sure you read that part of the fine print.
Re:Just reduce the bill (Score:3, Informative)
Most of those retailers probably don't want to get into spats with the credit card companies, which prohibit charging more for credit transactions than you do for regular transactions.
They do permit a 'cash discount' price, and so in effect it's probably merely six of one and half a dozen of another, but their enforcement is spotty, which is just what you'd expect of such a program, so it may be more trouble than it's worth.
Re:can I charge them 1.50$ ? (Score:3, Informative)
Your paper check most likely ends up in their ACH database by virtue of it being processed electronically anyway.
Re:Going paperless (Score:3, Informative)
No, you don't. I have T-Mobile -- signed up for paperless billing, but no where was I required to sign up for any sort of automatic debit. They don't even have a card number on file for me.
Re:A paper bill is a legal document. (Score:5, 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.
Re:Just reduce the bill (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not going to go into the security implications of it, but you could always use this [mozilla.org] to script the the website and bulldoze through all of the javascript, flash, etc. You can write a script that will take you all the way through logging in, clicking on the "pay my bill" button, fill in your credit card info, everything. Of course, you shouldn't do this.
But you can.