Verizon Drops $2 'Convenience Fee' Due to Complaints

"which was designed to improve the efficiency of those transactions"

What a load of PR crap.

This had nothing to do with customer complaints.

They dropped the fee when the FCC came into the game. If not for that, they would have let it ride.

So they drop the fee after the FCC said they will investigate the legitimacy of the $2 convenience fee.

Still, Verizon has revealed their true colors. They will not be able to make consumers forget.

Oh well, all American mobile operators suck anyhow. Verizon is a 37" giant in a land of three-foot midgets.

:) :p :D

Hasn't been a good month for Verizon PR. This debacle is clearly of their own making. A pox on their houses.

wouldn't it be cheaper for them to have more customers not use paper billing? less paper they need to buy, less ink they need to buy, less mailing they need to buy.

weirdos.

This has nothing to do with credit card fees. They are eliminating SINGLE payments. You still could've been doing monthly credit card payments without the fee.

What they want is to incentivize you to have recurring deductions, credit or debit, so that they are more likely to have their bills paid on time. This way you can't forget to pay. You also stop checking your statement as much, because you don't need to inspect the payment amount every time before you pay. This means that if you get overcharged or get hit with crazy overuse charges, you won't notice it, since you have the automatic credit/debit (And you may not be checking your statements as thoroughly).

Power to the people. GoDaddy, BofA and now Verizon.

Hardly.

This is only a victory for the credit card companies. I wouldn't be shocked at all if their lobbyists were making phone calls like mad in the last week or so. It's easy to look at it as a $2 fee, but if you look deeper, the fee only served as a push for consumers to investigate alternative ways to pay electronically through their bank which were just as simple and convenient but also safer. Sure, Verizon would make more money once they stopped having to pay a credit card company 2-3% processing fees, but again, why should they piss money away when there's a new, better and safer solution for all parties involved? It makes no logical sense when you think critically about it.

If people took the time to understand the implications and stopped wielding this foolishly-conceived notion of "freedom" around like a sword, they'd see that transitioning to electronic payments directly from the banks via eChecks/wire transfers (auto-pay is completely different and still set up through Verizon) is just as simple if not simpler than paying online through Verizon, safer because your bank is the only one that has your account information, and yet still better for Verizon because instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year to credit card companies, they could add to their profits which would make shareholders happy (which I don't care about but...) and then ideally lead to more money directed at maintaining, expanding and improving the network.

Again, the only winners here are the credit card companies, and they are absolutely not the one's that need any victories these days. Verizon and other corporations may have other issues worth discussing in terms of their ever-escalating bills and bandwidth caps and network progress and quality, but they're small fish compared to the credit companies.

WRONG....

This move by Verizon is much more insidious, as this guy goes on to say:

This has nothing to do with credit card fees. They are eliminating SINGLE payments. You still could've been doing monthly credit card payments without the fee.

What they want is to incentivize you to have recurring deductions, credit or debit, so that they are more likely to have their bills paid on time. This way you can't forget to pay. You also stop checking your statement as much, because you don't need to inspect the payment amount every time before you pay. This means that if you get overcharged or get hit with crazy overuse charges, you won't notice it, since you have the automatic credit/debit (And you may not be checking your statements as thoroughly).

Great news, now I won't have to worry about ATT trying to pull the same crap. If you don't think they already have credit card fees baked into their model, you're a moron. This was simply an attempted money grab by them and their customers called their bluff.

Mark my words, they'll find a way to add some fee to screw their customers. I give it a few months, at most.

I choose to pay as many bills as possible with my credit card. I like the year end statements, ease of finding any transaction and oh yeah, my cash back. :D

Great! That saves me the trouble of setting up an automatic PAPER check being sent via SNAIL MAIL.

It's just a game to suck more money out of their customers. It reminds me of when Ma Bell would charge for touch tone phone service over rotary dial even though the technology was cheaper for them to run.

Yes I'm old and have seen technology fees gimmicks before.

I'm retired but my old job included programming the phone switch for a government agency. The fees you pay the phone company are a total ripoff. Caller ID, for example, is a one time two minute programming job and requires no maintenance. They still charge you monthly for the service although it cost them nothing except a one time expense of a few minutes of time of a programmer. All add ons are just the same. What a scam!

Great! That saves me the trouble of setting up an automatic PAPER check being sent via SNAIL MAIL.

It's just a game to suck more money out of their customers. It reminds me of when Ma Bell would charge for touch tone phone service over rotary dial even though the technology was cheaper for them to run.

Yes I'm old and have seen technology fees gimmicks before.