Verizon to add another surcharge on some bills [telecom]

It looks like they are adding the fee to cover charges made by their bank or costs, which appears to me to be much lower then they are going to charge. I pay my AT&T, Sprint and a lot of other bills and have never been charged anything.

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Perhaps this is a result of the recent rules to protect credit card users, which for the first time allow vendors to charge reduced prices to cash customers.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com

FALSE TO FACT. Historically credit-card _merchant_ contracts have forbidden charging a _higher_ price (i.e., a 'surcharge') for a customer who pays by credit card. *NOTHING* in either those merchant contracts, _nor_ 'in law' in general forbids giving a discount for paying cash. And some merchants have been _doing_ it for multiple decades.

But, bringing this back to phone companies and similar utilities, typically one receives a bill for a set amount. They do not give a discount for paying by cash (or any other particular way). In the case of companies like telcos, I'm not sure the average customer (outside a big city) has any way to pay by cash anyhow, it would almost always be by check or ACH.

But there is often a higher price to pay (online) with a CC. It may be that just calling it a "convenience fee" (that phrase does sound familiar) instead of a "surcharge" is all it takes for them to get away with it, which would make such a contract clause not worth the paper it was written on.

And the end customer doesn't really have any standing to challenge it, since they're not a party to the contract between the CC company and the merchant. Not if the CC company doesn't care.

Dave