Companies Using Slow Economy As A Cop Out To Charge More
by Tran, Harry ~ July 3rd, 2009. Filed under: Quick Blast.I was pondering such a question because it seems that lately more companies have been raising their prices on services, including monthly services with small incremental increases.
A month back, I recall my credit card company raising my interest rate by about 2 percentage points, that got me irate because I was a solid customer, and notice the term was because I am no longer using their services. Today I got a letter in the mail saying that T-Mobile my phone company of choice is going to raise some fees that fund their regulatory obligation services by $0.50 cents per line on my account. While this isn’t going to be more than $2.00 since I have 4 accounts on my line, I don’t appreciate fee increases without proper explanation, and don’t feel the one page letter gave a reasonable explanation at all.
Could this mean the company is trying to get more money from their customers in a different way as a consequence of the slowing economy? Because they can no longer report strong sale numbers on their balance sheets they decide they can hike fees across the board with their customers and they’ll get the same break even increase in profits even if they were losing a few customers to delinquency on the other end because those customers could no longer afford to keep up with their bills.
Have you gotten any experiences where a company you have remained quite loyal to went ahead and hiked your fees up without due reason?
