By The Way...

Off of the AOL Welcome Screen: Fees! Fees! Fees! -- a BusinessWeek article detailing how corporations cheerfully nickel-and-dime people with hidden fees or fees otherwise not disclosed until one is in the process of making a purchase. The article mentions that one of the reasons for these fees is that thanks to the fairly miserable state of the economy, companies can't raise prices without a backlash, so they're tacking on the fees, which aren't part of the "purchase price." But come now. If one can't complete a transaction without the fees, then it's part of the cost of the thing or the service.

It does make a difference. I would go to substantially more music concerts, for example, if the additional "fees" that come with the ticket did not sometimes equal the cost of the ticket itself. That's just ridiculous. And it's not that I can't afford the total cost; I simply don't like paying for things that are of no direct value to me. As a result, I go to two or three concerts a year, not five or six. Considering how CD profits are in the toilet, you'd think that those in the music industry would want to prop up the live end of things.

We have a lot of companies try to tack on charges against us, but most of those extra charges don't make it past my wife, who is more than happy to scare the heck out of any poor corporate wage-slave who tries to slip an extra charge past her, and then scare his or her manager. We both also have nice long memories about these things as well; we're the opinion that you can charge us a stupid fee exactly once, but we're not going to give you the opportunity to do it more than that.

Interestingly, when you put it to a corporation that way, they often back off the extra fees. But there's at least one phone company I can think of that didn't believe us, which was the same company who called us a week after we switched asking if there was anything it could do to get us back. All I can say is, be glad you weren't the poor phone company telemarketer who had to deal with my wife on that phone call.

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