When you hand over your hard-earned money to a company....
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2011/12/verizon-you-have-to-pay-us-to-give-us-your-money/
Verizon: You have to pay us to give us your money
Discussion in 'News & Current Events' started by freeatlast, Dec 29, 2011.
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InTheLight Well-Known MemberSite Supporter
Oh, you mean like when you pay interest on a loan.
Or when you get charged a fee for making too many deposits into a low fee checking account.
Or when you get cash out of a non-network ATM.
Or when you make a telephone payment to 100's of other businesses.
Or when you elect to make monthly or quarterly payments on your auto insurance rather than one annual payment.
The point is that Verizon is not doing anything extraordinary. -
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If you dont like it, go to another company
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preachinjesus Well-Known MemberSite Supporter
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Crabtownboy Well-Known MemberSite Supporter
The resident Republicans should love this. It is making money for a big corporation and the millionaire corporate executives.
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Earth Wind and Fire Well-Known MemberSite Supporter
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Actually, I believe this is no different than the $5 ATM charge that Bank of America has instituted, which other financial institutions gave up on due to the uproar it caused. The charge from Verizon is if you want to make a "one-time" payment online or by your Verizon phone. If you use a recurring EFT, no $2 charge. So the incentive is for you to allow them to automatically withdraw funds from your account, usually for the full amount they believe you owe them; or be "penalized" with a $2 charge each time you decide when and how much you're going to pay them.
I also believe AT&T, Sprint, etc. will watch for the public reaction, and either institute similar fees (if the reaction is small); or use it to their advantage in advertising ("unlike other companies, we don't penalize you for online payments"). -
The only credit card we pay by automatic computer is Costco-AMX and they give a week to protest charges.
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preachinjesus Well-Known MemberSite Supporter
You can't even stay consistent in your attempts at being a curmudgeon ;)
The free market is the best and only way to create free people and sustain economic growth that benefits all people. Because of free markets more people are better off than they would have been for generations under any other system. -
righteousdude2 Well-Known MemberSite Supporter
Maybe Verizon Would Credit you...
....with a year of free services for using that high-dollar word (curmudgeon - a word I hadn't heard used in years) to describe anothers imput. :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:
Seriously, I left Time Warner (it once the only game in town) for Verizon. They had a tremendous bundle package, which, unlike TW, has remained at the price they promised it would be for 24 months. I am afraid of what it will be in 14 months, as the two-year contract expires, but, for now, I am saving a bundle on their bundle. -
Check out how the manufacturing sector has had flat, if not stagnant wages over the past two or three decades. -
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The primary function is to determine what people are willing to pay for some thing. The second function is as a means of determining the most efficient way of supplying the thing.
Take police protection, for example. Is police protection a different sort of consumer good than cars or food?
Prior to Sir Robert Peel's invention of London's Metro Police Department, rich people had to hire their own army to protect them. The working class working in a metropolitan area had to fend for themselves. Each area had a sheriff but he was owned by the lord of the town who was owned by the king. The royalty didn't care much what happened to the common people.
The rich and the royalty decided that it was profitable for them to have civil order in the cities. They didn't care about the common people. For the next 100 years every municipality (and counties had sheriffs on the payroll) had a local police department and it worked well. The rich people and the working class trusted their local police to protect them
In the 1960's US society (social contract) changed. Now days people spend much more on private protection than the total cost of all federal, state, and local policing combined and the people still don't feel safe. In metro areas, many people don't trust their local police to protect them.
Are local police departments now the most cost effective way to police the metro areas? Half the new construction seems to be expensive gated communities. These rich people obviously don't trust their local police to protect them. Should the working class people depend upon their local police? Maybe neighborhoods should be walled and gated with each neighborhood hiring its own guards. -
>What other economic system would have resulted in increasing wages in the manufacturing industry?
How is this economic system going to increase wages in the USA now that 80% of the manufacturing jobs went south and very south? How will "right to work" increase wages?
How will jobs in China increase US wages? -
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I believe we should have a robust manufacturing sector where workers put in a hard day's work and receive decent compensation. I especially like companies where workers have access to profit-sharing. This is a good incentive for workers to do their best and excel since when the company makes more money there is more available for the people who produce the product. -
Sprint tried to charge me when I tried to pay at a Sprint store. They said it was because they were just a store, not a payment center, though they accepted payments.
AT&T also charges to pay in person or over the phone. You can pay via their machine at AT&T instead of paying a live person, thus avoiding the fee, but half the time I go to use the machine, there ends up being a problem with it. Pretty ridiculous to charge someone for the act of paying for a product!
I found it very insulting when it first happened to me. I go to pay a bill and they want to charge me money to do so. And it wasn't $2, it was $5 at both Sprint and AT$T and to my knowledge, it still is.
So that makes three carriers who charge customers to pay their bills. Kinda hard to "go elsewhere if you don't like it" when everyone is jumping on the bandwagon to screw over their customers.
Yep, very sad. Customer service is pretty much just a memory in most places. I thought the slumping economy might revive it a bit since people tend to be more loyal to places that don't treat them like dirt, but instead, the opposite has happened and companies are getting more aggressive towards customers. Weird. -
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