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."
Use less paper then (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.
Paper, Accountability (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 $125? Okay--but I'm still the only person with a legitimate paper trail...
Sorry--paper is out there for a reason.
can I charge them 1.50$ ? (Score:3, Interesting)
If they want me to pay electronically, can I charge them 1.50 for the added risk of electronic commerce? It's one thing to put your check routing number in a paper envelope and sent it by US mail. it's a whole nother level of trust to send it over the internet and rely on their databases to be properly secured. Look at all the whole sale breeches.
Speaking as a victim of identity theft, Personally, my own weighing of the risks is that I wont do electronic commerce other than insured visa cards until the laws are changed to make it their responsibility if they lose my bank account information. When that happens my expectation will be that they will pay the proper attention to security and it will be safer than mailing checks.
A paper bill is a legal document. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Paper bills = accountability (Score:3, Interesting)
Background: In switching to AT&T, I wanted the process to go smoothly and thus ported my numbers in advance (two weeks) of contract termination, fully intending to pay my normal monthly bill for the period including the two weeks. T-Mobile claimed that by porting my numbers, I had actively canceled my contract early, and claimed this was in the contract I could access online (despite knowing that they had blocked online access). So I pulled out my printed contract from nearly two years earlier, and asked them to cite chapter and verse to back up their claim. They obviously couldn't, it wasn't in there, nor would FCC rules allow it to be. So they backed down.
Re:Just reduce the bill (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Yes, particularly with T-Mobile, who lie (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly.
I'm going to be leaving T-Mobile UK shortly, because they overcharged me for several months having screwed up a transfer to a new package, and then had the audacity to accuse me of lying because I didn't notice the small amount in question immediately. (There is now way that any reasonable person with my usage history would have asked for the combination of facilities they claim I did: it was basically the new package plus part of my old package providing essentially the same service that they hadn't cancelled properly.)
In this case, it's not really worth chasing them for the small amount of money concerned, I'll just take satisfaction in voting with my wallet. However, having the itemised, printed bills from them would certainly have been useful had it been worth going to court over.
Also, it's interesting that they told me a few years back that they wanted to stop sending me itemised bills, immediately after I'd caught them overcharging me using the itemisation just the previous month. They do charge for itemisation, which I rather resent, since they demonstrably aren't trustworthy to charge me a varying sum of money each month without explaining where it comes from.
Re:Just reduce the bill (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily, many may just use their bank website to pay ALL their bills from....rather than log onto every different site out there to pay individual bills.
Re:Just reduce the bill (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.