If you haven’t considered following this blog – you might want to do it now. Not only would I appreciate it, but I am going to try and hit every industry in the next few articles and make you aware of some of those annoying extra fees you might find each time you try to buy something.
As I said in previous articles, I look over my receipts. I am totally annoyed by all the extra fees that companies keeping adding to my totals. Who came up with this method of charging for things anyway? What happened to the one price method? These added fees and charges always pop up after I buy something and especially when I have no choice to opt out, go elsewhere for my items, or even negotiate it away.
Any commodity or item, you use for convenience or out of necessity can have these fees tacked on. My opinion is that it started with sales tax. Almost all of the states have it and, I believe they all thought charging everyone a little extra on everything would help them fill their coffers. No one in the check out line ever said, you know I don’t think I’ll pay the sales tax today. Basically, they couldn’t – the states didn’t alloy anyone to have a choice. It’s pay the tax or you don’t get the item. Sure, we can all run off to Delaware (currently they don’t have a sales tax) but even Delaware would be full before long and they’d likely need to implement a sales tax to deal with all those extra residents.
Ultimately scores of businesses jumped on the bandwagon with the states and decided to add “additional fees” whether you like it, want them, use them or need them. These added fees are on almost everything. This phenomenon has prolifierated into just about every industry. Here’s a few that particularly annoy me. Remember everything I write is based on my own opinion and experiences and no one paid me to write these articles.
Phone Service: On most phone bills there are a myriad of charges like the access fees, 911 fees, sales tax, goverment fees, and line charges that even the phone company has a hard time explaining. Recently on my phone bill from a known carrier I had a new charge. This one is called a prop tax schg/fed reg fee and carrier universal service charge. These charges are NOT taxes or amounts required by law. They are charges which this company chooses to charge each user in order to collect and administer the “required” taxes and fees which ARE required by law. Really? Previously, when I checked this charge from this came company it said the extra fees were to recoup operation costs and real estate tax increases. Really? So any part of their business which needs an influx of cash that month? Because let’s face it people, those are not, in my opinion, legitimate extra costs to be passed on, those are straight forward operating costs which are supposed to be already built into their base price (and likely are).
