It used to be back in the day that people would write a physical check and then mail it to their respective utility company when paying their bill, or even go into the utility office itself, and pay it there. Back then, a utility bill was a utility bill, so if a given customer owed $95, that’s what they paid, no more and no less. Nowadays, while a customer can still pay most of the time via a physical check, this has been superseded by the paying of bills online, in which, truth be told, some utilities have no additional fee for those paying online, whereas others do. It is those others, that create the issue about being nickel-and dimed, because quite frankly there is going to be a lot more human effort involved in opening up an envelope, taking out the check, making sure to post the check to the right account for the right amount of money, and then depositing that check. For those who pay online, on the other hand, the payment structure is seamless because your login information contains the account number, and therefore, what is paid will automatically be aligned with your account. This would seem to be not only more efficient, but far less prone to any errors.
So then, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that fees have to be paid, to the utility company for paying online, when the efficiency of customers paying their bills online, should clearly be superior to the receipt of what use to be thousands upon thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of physical checks. This then would presuppose that the reason these fees are being imposed really has nothing to do with being fair and considerate, but as a way and means to extract additional money from customers, in which, because utility companies are regulated, just seems wrong.
In any business enterprise there are multiple avenues to add to revenue, and one of those pathways is to nickel-and-dime the customer, which in theory, doesn’t hurt them much, because the amount of money, they are being charged for the convenience of paying online is minimal, of which, because utility companies can easily have hundreds of thousands of customers, those small fees add up for those utility companies to quite a bit of money.
It just seems like bad optics to add on a convenience fee, especially when that fee amount is fixed, which signifies for those that don’t have a high utility bill that they are paying a much higher percentage of the total bill that is thus represented by that fee, as compared to someone else whose bill is considerably higher. Yet, this is the way that it is, because the one thing about America is that it’s considered to be OK to nickel-and-dime a customer, because that demonstrates ingenuity in extracting more from a customer than they really should legitimately get, but it sure doesn’t seem fair, and it sure doesn’t seem right.