“Just hours after an FCC investigation began, Verizon has said it will drop the contentious $2 ‘convenience fee,'” Electronista reports.
“It directly acknowledged the customer backlash as the core reason,” Electronista reports. “In a questionable justification, though, it claimed the fee had been implemented to ‘improve the efficiency ‘s payments, although it decided that simply educating customers would be easier.”
Electronista reports, “The cost was generally considered an attempt to steer more subscribers towards automatic payments, where the $2 fee would be waived.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In related news, Verizon today announced a $2 across-the-board rate increase to cover blah, blah, blah (subject to state and federal excise taxes). Just kidding (but really not).
Well, i’ll be damned…Verizon actually did something to satisfy their customers.
No they didn’t. They couldn’t care two sh*ts about satisfying their customers. What they do care about is their public image; and this quick retraction of their proposed fee shows the power of the people to influence a company’s public image when they are connected over the internet, where news travels much, much faster than it ever could on radio or tv.
Considering how many things have gone terribly wrong in American society, it is doubly tragic that so much of the potential for good inherent in the social networking phenomenon is wasted on inane chitchat. Maybe that will change when the overlords start tightening the thumb screws.
You might like to check out avaaz.org, if you don’t know them, already. (Frothing right wingers who believe there is nothing wrong with the world that giving even more power to the overlords wouldn’t fix need not look.)
We are dumping the Kenyan chimp is less than a year.
… I’m not particularly thrilled with PRESIDENT Obama’s results, either, but don’t believe McCain would have been as “good”.
And, the man IS The President of The United States and you should be as respectful towards him as That Office Deserves.
By the way … do the NoPublicans have a candidate yet? They don’t seem to like the Republican (Romney) or any of the idiot Tea Baggers. Not for more than a few weeks, any way. Gonna run Reagan again? Who do you have who isn’t so fatally flawed they can steal the election? I’m afraid it’s going to be four more years of “the lesser of multiple Evils”, of “the one who isn’t stark raving crazy”.
Respect? Really? In retrospect, it is crystal clear that Obama and Bush are both serving the same master. It doesn’t matter who is elected president anymore. The president and his cabinet are ultimately just a figureheads. The real leaders of the free world are the big corporations. If you had as much power and influence as they have, wouldn’t you want to rule the world? It doesn’t matter who is elected, and “the lesser of multiple evils” isn’t good enough if we really care about our freedom.
I respect the office off the President, but never the illegal monkey’s ass that currently occupies it
Again, we are way off topic…but it is true.
It no longer matters who is the president of this once great country. We are all slaves to corporations and big banks.
And greed will be our downfall.
@david
Take off your robe and hood.
“Monkey ass” is a disgusting racial slur. Please take your bigotry somewhere else.
I might not like Obama but that kind of language makes me want to vote for him again just to piss you off.
I receive many petitions from avaaz.org and sign many of them. I also get petitions from dozens of other progressive organizations. But none of them can really make a significance difference until they all join together and speak with one voice. I hope this happens in 2012.
I was being sarcastic, actually. Your second paragraph is spot on though.
Thank you, sir, for stopping the beating.
it doesn’t really matter they just charge everyone higher monthly fees instead
By the way, Ticketmaster has been ripping people off with their “convenience fees”. I say we go after them next.
uhhhh
Open letter to Verizon,
Just be the dumb pipe. People will respect you more for reading the writing on the wall. it is inevitable anyways.
Cordially,
An ex Verizon Customer
P.S.Whoever had the idea of that $2.00 fee should be fired. If you wanted to squeeze another couple of bucks out of your customers, pick a more justifiable B.S. excuse
@nomoremsbs:
I like your PS (Fire the stupid executive)
We’re still a Verizon customer … but we’re going to go back to paying their bill by Old Fashioned snail mail check: we know that it sends them two messages:
1. that we weren’t going to pay their stupid $2 fee
2. that their claims were utter BS … and they’re now going to pay for it, because we know that their cost to process a paper-based payment is higher than electronic credit card (even with the 2-4% fee).
-hh
Netflix, CitiBank, now Verizon! When will the MBA Idiots learn that since the Internet, You can’t run roughshod over your customers any more? Consumers have power now!
I like this comment posted at Electronista –
“Hey Verizon. How about issuing a $2 credit for every payment we make using your preferred method. I bet that would “Educate” us.”
I for one wish they would have let the fee stay in place for one billing cycle. That way, I could have terminated my current service (getting out of the 2-year lock-in), and then gone back on without a lock-in after a couple of days. (Remember, if a carrier unilaterally changes terms of service, that gives you the right to cancel, regardless of lock-in terms or “early cancellation fees”.)
The problem is clear. Verizon pays a fee on every credit card transaction. So in effect they give everyone paying by credit card a discount on the the amount paid directly to Verizon because part of the payment goes to the credit card company. In other words, those of us not pay by credit card pay more directly to Verizon and nothing to the credit card company. We subsidize those paying by credit card; I understand the subsidy is highest to those using American Express because of higher fees.
I suggest Verizon explicitly state the amount of every credit card transaction on the customer receipt so the consumer knows where the money is going.
Rob,
While it is true that credit cards get a cut, processing a snail mail paper payment isn’t free either.
-hh
The rationale behind accepting credit card payments is that the convenience of credit cards attracts additional customers who will not (or cannot) pay for the service by other means. So, Gross Revenue goes up by sacrificing a bit of the Gross Margin on CCard payments.
The MBA logic is to get the additional revenue by accepting CCard payments and then reneging on the deal by trying to claw back the lost margin (ie. the CCard fee) or to look at it another way trying to dump the fee that they originally agreed to pay onto the consumer.
What underlies this logic is complete disrespect for the consumer: in essence their original response to protest was, “So! What are YOU going to do about?”. Go on the Internet and diss you bigtime, Bazinga! (As Sheldon would say.)
“… about IT?” Forgot the ‘it’ in the penultimate sentence. Now my post makes sense.
“it claimed the fee had been implemented to . . .”
Well, because we want your money.
The current two-party political system is a cancer that is killing this nation. Democrats are the party of Welfare. Republicans are the party of War. The only thing that’s going to save this nation is the emergence of a third political party! One hundred and fifty plus years of Democrats and Republicans is enough.
You can’t have an effective third party without overhauling the whole political system from the ground up. Ralph Nader has proved this more than once. The political system itself is rotten to the core.