Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Nickeled and Dimed by Corporate America

Nickeled and Dimed by Corporate America

Sorry if I draw your mind to Barbara Ehrenreich; have a little toke or two to clear your thoughts. It's what she would do.

Now, let's reflect for a moment on how big service-based corporations suck the small change out of you every month for "fees" they made up to add to your bill.

My mother recently switched to digital cable because she mistakenly thought that analog cable (instead of analog broadcast) would be out the window next year. When she spoke with a sales person about getting a couple of aw-cute channels like Hallmark, the sales person told her it was included in the basic tier of digital service.

The technician shows up several hours late (and back times his service log to show that he was on time), and my mother, now digitally cabled, discovers she does not have the channels she was promised. A call to the consumer inquiries line indicates that they're not really basic tier. But just because my mother took an extra effort, the company gave her what she was promised in the first place.

This anecdote led your humble narrator into a rather complete Leo Getz style They, erm, screw you with the customer service rant that touched on these fees.

Techdirt led me to this story that indicates that average consumers (according to a survey) spend almost $1000 a year paying little fees (regulatory cost recovery fees, number portability fees, and so on) that companies add on to their advertised prices.

If you're making $40,000 a year, that's 2.5% of your income, brah.

It irks the heck out of me that as the content and the Army of Davids thing makes the content cheaper and whatnot, that the people who control the infrastructure continue to combine and coalesce into large corporations that can levy these absurd and unethical surcharges leaving their customers, often contractually-bound customers, bound to pay the price since they have no alternative.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think that the corporations often have a legitimate beef with the increased costs of regulatory compliance and the added costs of government layering on a couple more taxes. But we consumers give them too much latitude to slather us with additional costs when the last quarter came in a little light on Wall Street, too.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:16 PM