I was thinking the other day about the evolution of telephone communication.
Cricket’s 25$/mo plan (basic phone service, no data) gets you:
[ul]
[li]No long-distance fees in the US.[/li][li]Call waiting, call forwarding, party lines. Presumably other things like caller ID. [/li][li]Unlimited text messaging. [/li][li]Unlimited minutes.[/li][/ul]
Bullets one and two would have cost an arm and a leg in pre-cell landline days, and all of them were either add-on or metered features in cell phone plans for years after they became ubiquitous. So - features which were once premium have become standard within the context of the same service.
Are there any other examples?
An interesting reversal - online console gaming used to be free, but is now a service you have to pay for.
Many banking services. With my first checking account years ago, the account cost something like $5 or so a month plus a charge for each check. I had to buy the checks too. My first cash machine card cost me 45 cents for each use. A bounced check cost $25. Now my checking account is free including checks, my cash machine card is now a debit card that I can use just about anywhere and I have free overdraft protection up to $1500.
I have noticed that a lot of retail establishments are charging to use credit or debit cards. I stopped at a small town gas station yesterday, they wanted $1 plus 10 cents a gallon more than the cash price for gas.
My debit card refunds ATM withdrawal fees. I don’t normally use cash except during summer street festival season, but I love being able to withdraw smaller amounts of cash and not worry about the $3-$5 ATM fees.
When AT&T first introduced Touch-Tone phones, they charged a premium to customers for having Touch-Tone service / phones. For at least some of the Baby Bells, they continued to charge the surcharge at least through the late 1980s / early 1990s. This was despite the fact that, as it was explained to me by a friend who worked at one of the Baby Bells, by that point in time, it actually cost the phone companies less to handle a Touch-Tone call than a call that used the old-style pulse dialing.
Despite it’s many faults, Taxachusetts gets one thing right–surcharges for credit cards and debit cards are illegal. Not to mention that it goes against the Terms of Service in the merchant agreement, but I suppose that they can be overlooked if no one squawks.
That small town gas station should get paid with a coffee can of mixed change.
The gas station, and every other business that accepts cards, gets charged by the card company for each such transaction.
It’s true that in many states the credit card companies managed to make it illegal for the businesses to explicitly pass this charge on to their customers. That doesn’t mean that the cost goes away, however. It just means that the business needs to charge cash and card customers alike extra to cover the cost.
And radios. Radios were once an optional extra in cars at least as recently as the 1970s. IIRC Honda was among the first to make the radio a standard feature when they introduced the Accord circa 1976, at least for a non-luxury brand. One of the strategies the Japanese brands used to to sell cars in the US at that time was to offer cars with features standard that the American brands charged extra for.
Visa and Mastercard removed the terms of service about charging additional fees for using a CC several years back 2015? - I thought the same thing as you and looked it up the other day as they seem to have gotten more common and indeed they have. This site says that state and federal laws may still restrict surcharges but the CC companies’ terms of service are simply that a public posting about such a charge be clear.
The first time I bought a car, in 2001, ashtrays and cigarette lighters were no longer standard. You had to pay extra for the $200 “smoker’s option”. When I bought my next new car in 2014, floor mats were not standard, and you had to purchase an expensive option to get them, or else find aftermarket floor mats.
I always hear that charging more for credit is against the policy store owners must sign to be able to take credit cards in the first place. But I see enough places with a “cash discount” instead of a “credit surcharge”, even though they’re the same thing, that it must be an easy loophole to take advantage of.
Almost everything that people “know” about credit card laws and regulations and almost everything the internet says became false in 2010 when the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Act was passed.
Cash discounts (which in effect are the same thing as extra charges for credit cards) are now legal in all 50 states and credit card issuers are not allowed to enforce any contract terms that prohibit them. Minimum credit purchases (of $10 or less) are similarly legal.
The first ATM card I had was back in '81 or '82. There was no fee to get it or use it. The idea was that it would free up teller’s lines and reduce check writing. It didn’t stay that way for long. I now have a checking account that pays a measly interest along with no fees, but recently the credit union I use has started charging $5 for mailed statements, and they changed to a new online program that isn’t as thorough as the older one was.
I had to pay extra for a radio in my first car. 1992 Geo Metro. Also had to pay extra for automatic transmission. I can’t remember if it came with floor mats or not.
DrCube mentioned the smoker’s option. I remember my dad paying extra for and having to special order a car without a cigarette lighter. This would have been early-mid 80s. It was a Chevy something-or-other, I want to say a Caprice.
Interestingly, the one and only time that I was looking at buying a car, and discovered that the radio was not a standard feature was when I was considering a Honda Civic in 1991.
I was on the verge of buying a new Civic which I had taken out for a test drive, only to have the salesperson engage in several bait-and-switch tactics, including revealing that the price of the car was several hundred dollars higher than the sticker price, because radios were not standard equipment in those cars, and the radio which was in the car I was about to buy had been installed by the dealer. (Annoyed by the various shady tactics, I left, and wound up buying a Mazda Protege, instead.)
Not at gas stations, where surcharges makes it difficult to comparison shop if you’re using credit since I have never seen the surcharge even displayed in the price sign let alone prominently displayed. On the other had, I do occasionally see “cash discount” prominently displayed in the sign. I wonder why.
And every business that takes cash gets charged by the employee who has to spend time counting the cash that’s received, and by the bank that provides them with rolls of change, etc.
