Obscure Charges That Utility Companies Add to Bills

A "mistake" at the phone company caused them to bill us in the 1990s for the calls we made to dial-up. The whole purpose of using that company was that they had zero charges for local calls of any length, and the dial-up service existed /because/ of that facility, dozens of households were like ours and just stayed connected over dial-up for days at a time. Essentially it's the same service you'd now think of as normal (via DSL) except much less bandwidth and you can't receive phone calls (we all had mobiles). This gave me the important insight that what most mattered for newer technologies like ADSL is that they are Always On Internet, not the bandwidth increase, because we had no extra bandwidth compared to neighbours but we used the Internet very differently because it was perpetually there. There was some 10base2 running around the house to a Linux PC with a modem and a NAT mapped all the PCs onto the dial-up address.

Anyway the person who sorted phone bills out got this bill for some obscene amount of money and they phoned up to say no, these calls are contractually supposed to be free, send us a revised bill that removes these charges.

The phone company says "Ah, you need to specifically identify any call you're disputing and then we can consider altering the charges". Which is now making _us_ do their job. Nope.

So he just gets the bill and crosses everything out. Absolutely everything on the bill gets crossed out, test calls, dial-up, everything, and sure enough the phone company took the hint and just zeroed the bill and stopped messing us about.

My friend had to call and argue a charge that was added for not paying the full amount due, except that the only balance left was the amount of the fee. If the fee was never applied the bill would have been paid in full. Of course they argued him about this and he wasted 2 hours on the phone. I'm pretty sure this is on purpose and the bank on the fact that most people would likely ignore the few dollars fee because it's not worth the hassle arguing with them and wasting time.

Edit: For anyone wondering, this was PSE&G in NJ

The real evil here is that the surcharges are "all on top of the price that regulators have agreed customers should pay for their electricity service."

Utilities support basic human necessities. We need power for light and heat. When the base cost for these necessities rises (to subsidize infrastructure projects), the poor are the hardest hit. And the fact that these governments are essentially "hiding" taxes inside of utility payments is outrageous.

Here in Phoenix, APS (and maybe SRP too, but I have never been their customer) who supplies our power has this extra charge on the bill (I forget what they call it) that doesn't seem to be tied to anything - and randomly fluctuates per billing period.

Most all of their other charges you can see or can easily find out how they are calculated; they either list how on the bill itself, or with enough digging on their website, you can find the information. And while such charges may not be entirely "likable" - you can at least see what they are for, and can figure out how to mitigate them in some manner.

But this one charge - and I wish I had a copy of my bill in front of me to know what it's name was - it doesn't seem to be tied to anything - yet the amount is a significant fraction of the entire bill; sometimes up to a third of the bill in total!

I was looking at it one day years ago, and I couldn't figure it out. I went on the website, googled the hell outta it, and nothing could be found on what it even was, let alone how it was calculated. It's name was very obscure, yet it took up so much of the bill that I wanted to know what it was and how I could lower it. I showed my wife, and she was just as confused.

The following day she called up APS and talked to somebody there, and despite staying on the phone for a few hours, they couldn't tell her anything as to what it was or how it was calculated. I don't know if that was a ruse on their part, or what, but to this day we have this extra charge/fee on our bill, and we have to pay it, but nobody can tell us anything about it, what it is, how it works, etc.

I would personally love to go "off grid" and tell them to stick it, but here in Phoenix (and possibly other states and municipalities as well) they've (utility companies and lobbyists) made it their goal (if it hasn't been enacted in full yet - I haven't kept up on it) to make it a "law" that says if you have a home that has pre-existing hookup to the house, you have to pay for that hookup whether you use it or not.

I'm still trying to figure out how that is considered to be legal or fair, and why - if it is, and becomes mandated - why the republicans in our legislature, who accept this, are against the healthcare coverage mandate of the ACA...

This fee inflation seems to be more and more prevalent. Whenever there is pressure to keep the base price low, fees are invented.

For utilities, it’s regulatory pressure.

For hotels, it’s competition on advertised prices. Airbnb is particularly bad about this.

See also Verizon Math [1] for a different failure mode of utility company surcharge billing!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU

I used to use autopay for all my bills but no longer use it mainly because if there's a calculation mistake or an unwarranted charge on the bill, by the time I notice (if I notice at all), the money would have been taken out of my account and it is hard to get already paid money back. Now I review each bill before paying. Just to be clear I have never had any unwarranted charges on my bill but I have heard on local news about people getting thousands of dollars of utility bill due to billing error - so I no longer do autopay.

Rules of Acquisition, number #1: Once you have their money, you never give it back.

Bell Canada used to have a “Network Charge” of $5/month on their landlines.

It seemed like a mandatory fee, but instead it was a charge they added on top of their crappy long distance plans. Some of which you paid a monthly fee to have for access to “discounted” rates.

Changing to another LD provider gave even cheaper rates for no monthly fees.

The one upside for me about obscure charges on my cable TV bill years ago is that it pissed me off and as a result I canceled cable TV.

I’m much better off without cable and it was obscure charges that motivated me to cut the cord.

My favorite was a large cable carrier that stats with the letter C that managed to slide in 13 monthly bills. When confronted with it, I was given the choice to pay or cancel service...

Back in the '90s a cable company started to also provide phone service in the LA area. One little problem was that their billing software was unable to calculate the up to 6 different taxes applicable on an address by address basis.