Convenience fee, when there is only one option to pay and the only one who finds it convenient is the service provider.
Just got charged for reading it
Submitted 2 months ago by SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com to [deleted]
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/d7b4aa8a-53d6-4f23-83be-9f3f86a43a61.webp
Comments
mp3@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
andros_rex@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ve tried setting up bank draft for my electric like 6 times, to avoid the 3% “convenience fee” for using a credit card. For some reason, it will not work. They have the option, I set it up, it says I need to wait several days to use it, and then it just vanished from my account.
Calling the company gets me a rude person who barely speaks English. Government subsidized monopolies. Internet is even worse.
feannag@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Not sure your location, but in the us at least most banks have a bill pay service where they will send a paper check for you at no cost.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not sure your location
I bet it’s Texas.
scytale@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The worst for me is my gas bill. My bill is usually around $50-$60 per month, and when you break it down, the actual gas I use is $3. The rest are fees.
Siegfried@lemmy.world 2 months ago
If fees are independent or partially independent of consumption, i would consider jumping to all electric.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m in Texas, and our electric provider added a $200/month fee for all accounts for the next 2 decades to pay for the 2021 winter storm. They bought electricity from other providers during the storm for like 1000x the standard rate and passed the cost towards future customers.
And the beauty of that is that those fees also impact solar users who aren’t even using power, since a certificate of occupancy requires that a house be connected to the grid.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
And then when more than a third of people do that, suddenly the state mandates paying for a connection anyways. (Of course the mandate is completely unrelated to the nice dinners that senators enjoy.)
scytale@lemm.ee 2 months ago
That’s the plan for the future. It’s easy to switch to induction for cooking. The bigger and more expensive switch are the A/C and water heater, which I need to assess (and budget) for.
saigot@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I have converted to a heat pump and induction stove. I legally need auxiliary power to heat my home, so I have to pay 30 dollars a month just for the gas hookup.
sevan@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
It drives me nuts that my state has “deregulated” natural gas. All natural gas in the region is supplied to every home by a single company (the same one as before deregulation). I pay at least $35 a month all year just for the privilege of being connected to it.
BUT, I don’t actually do business with that company. I get to pick from a dozen companies that all provide front-end billing for my natural gas. They advertise how much they will charge per therm used (plus an admin fee), but that price is on top of what I pay to the company actually providing gas. If I have an issue with the gas, the supplier comes out to deal with it, not the company I pay every month. And, I have to change companies every 6-24 months to maintain the advertised rates, otherwise they increase my cost after the new customer price expires. Its fake competition that added an extra step to the process and increases prices compared to the regulated version that used to exist.
windowsphoneguy@feddit.org 2 months ago
Don’t forget to tip your landlord
i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.
My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.
The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.
They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 2 months ago
$50 fee for other people using solar panels
DrunkAnRoot@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
another dollar wont hurt fee ahould be 1.75 cos of taxes
Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
The fees are bad… but the amount of bullshit they can make you jump through to hook solar up to your place is bullshit of an entirely different fragrance. They can take up to a month to approve or deny the plan, suggest revisions, and then take another month, up to 90 days worth. Then they have ANOTHER 90 days after the fact to “inspect and approve” or “suggest revisions” to the installation. It’s a god damned Columbian goat screw
billwashere@lemmy.world 2 months ago
$389.69
I had to sorry.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
That’s all they want you to look at anyway
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
This is why you should never privatize natural monopolies.
Hikermick@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No billing fee?
letsgo@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I always thought BT should get into the property market. They could sell a house, then rent that house to its new owner, then charge them a fee for using each room.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I would be the shithead that would rotate from room to room daily just to fuck their billing up.
company I worked for had a customer that did this with virtual machines. every single week they would request their VMs from last week to be decommissioned and new ones to be built in their place. not bad if there’s only five or six. they had this done to over 300 VMs. we accepted for two years, the length of the contract and then promptly dropped them, hard.
the collective backlash caused the company to go bankrupt. they attempted to sue but our lawyers had already created enough documentation to prove we had successfully executed the contract the best of our abilities and had decided to not renew based on high operational costs attributed to the high maintenance requirement of their account and recommended they seek help from a larger competitive service.
the chaos they put operations through was horrible but was only part of the hell they unleashed. we had to dedicate a billing representative to their account because they contested every-single-fucking-bill. these calls would drag on for weeks before ending with them agreeing to pay what we were charging them, just before starting up for the next billing cycle.
point is, just because you’re locked in contract doesn’t mean they’re in control.
Pringles@lemm.ee 2 months ago
So I’m trying to wrap my head around why they would do this and how that even worked. They would decommission them on Friday and have them rebuilt on Monday? These didn’t have a specific config then I assume? And they did it because they paid per hour the machine existed so it made sense cost wise?
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
If your company was hosting virtual machines and people staring and stopping them caused you headaches, it just seems to me like the company you worked at was absolute trash lol.
callouscomic@lemm.ee 2 months ago
This is also how a $5 speeding ticket becomes $500. Thanks officer dipshit.
Emotional_Engi@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
2% TRT contribution fee.
Sunshine@piefed.social 2 months ago
The CAQ are trying to ram this down the throat de Quebec.
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Land of the fee and the home of the slave.
robotica@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Is this some USA joke I’m too European to understand?
ryedaft@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
What, you don’t have that? My electric bill has a rate, a rate for the network, a subscription fee, electricity green taxes, and sales tax. I’m European.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Australia checking in. We have the price per Kw, and the number of Kw consumed.
PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Here it boils down to:
calavera@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Nothing beats Portugal:
Kwh rate Social electricity finance tax General economic costs fee Infrastructure utilization fee Energy and geology exploration tax Electricity consumption Special tax Audiovisual contribution Sales tax
albert180@piefed.social 2 months ago
Usually taxes and transmission fees are rolled into the kWh Price you are shown when enrolling into the contract
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Land of the fee and the home of the slave.
mattd@programming.dev 2 months ago
Yeah probably. I’m in the US. Here’s how my bill is broken down:
Generation Service Charge
Customer Charge
Distribution Charge
Transition Charge
Transmission Charge
Net Meter Recovery Surcharge
Revenue Decoupling Charge
Distributed Solar Charge
Renewable Energy Charge
Energy Efficiency Charge
Electric Vehicle Program
Two of them (transition and revenue decoupling charges) are actually a credit of about $1 each
Zwiebel@feddit.org 2 months ago
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You’re allowed to buy electricity from a separate broker than your “power company” so they split the bill between power usage and service fees plus there’s state and local taxes.
db2@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Being allowed to on paper and actually being able to are wildly different things. They’re monopolies in most areas that get away with it by stringently denying that fact. Same with cable companies.
LilB0kChoy@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I’m curious about this, would you be willing to elaborate?
Where I live we don’t have a choice of electricity providers for my home. Are you talking about states that have deregulated energy markets?
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Your country had better have a state owned grid, with a state run retailer, else this is still the same sort of shit, just without hidden fees.
Sincerely, an annoyed Victorian/Australian that wishes their electricity was just managed by the state.
There may be no hidden fees where I’m from, but when there’s a private company with a monopoly, what’s the difference?
Capitalism/privatisation is such a scam
:(
twice_hatch@midwest.social 2 months ago
My bill in Illinois isn’t like this. There’s a couple fees to stay hooked into the grid and then a flat rate per unit energy
Variable rate would be nicer but I’m too busy to set it up
then_three_more@lemmy.world 2 months ago
In the UK it’s all rolled up into the “service charge”. Including the “loads of other companies couldn’t manage themselves properly and went bust and we had to take on their customers fee”
Zwiebel@feddit.org 2 months ago
Same in Germany, it’s called “base fee”