>>>Sure, the 2$ were designed for efficiency reasons. 2$/payment for let's say half their customers is 91M/month or a sweet billion dollars a year, very efficient!!
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>>Supposedly it cost them more money to do transactions when customers use debit or credit cards so the idea was to try to get people to pay some other way - which is of course really really stupid. It's my understanding that now the Federal Communications Commission is looking into this as well...hahaha. Hey if they want to up everyone's bill by two bucks, charging the customer for paying their bill is probably one of the dumbest ways to go about it and what kind of moron at VZW came up with this idea to begin with?
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>When I lived in Charlottesville (actually the surrounding county), the water bill was usually around $12 to $15 a month. Then they outsourced the billing to some outfit in Georgia, and all of a sudden each bill carried a $2 billing fee. Billing is a service to be surcharged for.

Interesting point of view I suppose - but I consider billing one of the costs of doing business.
As for water bills - last month the Hawaii board of water supply approved a 70% (yeah - that's right - 70%) rate increase - if things here weren't expensive enough already...geeeze.