Did Ticketmaster buy Duke Energy? They want an $8.50 convenience fee to pay the power bill online (whether with credit card or bank account).
@johns That's a lot of convenience right there!
Junk fees are the revenue extraction mechanism of the future.
Charging customers twice for services is a way to monetize non-revenue generating business units like IT or clerical.
Charging customers once through consumption fees & again for "administrative service" fees, is how banking converted themselves from a "managing money" service to "extracting service fees" as their revenue model.
Banks make more profit from service fees from you than from having a checking account with you.
For example, the profit margin of supplying electricity might be only 10%
However, $10 charges for having low wage clerks mailing out paper bills might mean profit margins of as much as 80%.
Ditto for IT, the digital infrastructure for an online bill payment is pennies per bill, but the service fee for it might bring in $8 in revenue.
A huge difference in profit margins for what used to be a business expense.
Corporations look forward to the day they can charge customers for having an AI answer their phones.
Customers, employees, vendors, the IRS, auditors, journalists; all paying for the dubious services of a "plausible sentence generator"
@johns Wow. I usually get the "we will charge you to mail us a check" notice.
@johns That is pure craziness. I’ve never heard of a company charging you anything to pay a bill with your bank account. It costs them more to process a paper check, but whatever.
Did they think they weren't going to get a paper check from a stationery store run by a shunner of proprietary JavaScript? DYKWIA?