Service outages have made Verizon customers grumpy the past few days. They probably won't be any happier about a leak from Droid-Life and confirmed by Phonescoop that Verizon's going to start charging a $2 "convenience fee" for paying your bill online or by phone starting January 15th.
This is preposterous for a few reasons. First, it's telling customers that the default state of nature as a Verizon customer is for everything to be a pain in the ass. You're charging to make something more convenient, when that convenience comes at no extra cost to you. In fact, that leads to the second thing: It almost certainly costs Verizon more to handle your bill if you pay by check/mail.
In fact, the last time a carrier tried to charge customers for how they paid their bills, it was T-Mobile doing the opposite and charging for receiving a paper bill at all. That fell through, but at this point, it's more common than whatever the hell Verizon is thinking. The charge doesn't affect auto-pay customers yet, but it's a shot across the bow; and for those of us who like to give our statement a scan before firing off a wad of currency to Verizon, that habit's about to become a luxury.
I'd bet something expensive that if everyone were to stop paying their bill online or by phone, and instead inundated Verizon with millions more envelopes, it would be a net loss for Verizon. So, incensed Verizon customers, let's see if my hypothesis holds true. Don't pay your bill online. Stuff your payment in an envelope, slap a stamp on it, and drop it in a mailbox. Let's bury them under a mountain of paper and see how they like that. [Droid Life, Phonescoop via TechCrunch]