All fees, every last one, are passed on to the consumer. It just annoying when it isn’t built into the price to begin with, so you think the price is lower than it really is.
It’s basically a modern version of bait-and-switch.
[QUOTE=BlinkingDuck]
A few years ago Charles Schwab sent an email saying I could get all the mail they send me sent to me online. This would save much in postage because they need to send me quite a bit of stuff.
No thanks…you can spend money mailing the stuff to me. I believe it is now free…but I still refuse because of the gall they had a few years ago. I won’t agree to it unless they give me something.
[/QUOTE]
Ask them next time you call. TD Ameritrade will give you some free trades to switch to electronic statements.
[QUOTE=Zeke N. Destroi]
Banks - Why should I have to pay $1.50 to go to a human teller? I get - hate but get - the “convenience” fee for ATMs but I walk in your door and you ding me? It’s like paying cover for Earth’s dullest discotheque.
[/QUOTE]
I had no idea that such a fee existed, but I have to say I love your analogy.
Also, this must really burn you up—it inspired you to make your fourth post in 5-1/2 years! 
I wish that they would institute a restocking fee where I work.
We sell a lot of special use tools, and there are people who blatently take advantage of our open return policy in what we call “free rentals”.
Lets say a person needs a tile saw to complete a single job in their house.
So they come in and “buy” a tile saw, use it and bring it back, dirty, worn blade, damaged packaging and often missing parts.
And then they get a full refund!
We are stuck with an item we will have to open, inspect, clean, repair, replace blade and THEN sell at a discount as it has been used and returned. the labour and materials costs related to this usually kill what ever margin/profit we make on the item before the discounted sale price. I know its stupid, but the business owners insist its required for good customer service.
I would estimate that 1-2% of our sales are “free rentals”!
A restocking fee would help to limit that.
Regards
FML
[QUOTE=ShelliBean]
At an, ahem, adult entertainment store I realized they had charge me $2 for some AA batteries used to test the merchandise
[/QUOTE]
That’s an awesome deal for 14 batteries! 
[QUOTE=Wheeljack]
I guess I’ve been going to the wrong parties or something, because I’ve never seen or heard of a bike without a kickstand. What the heck are you supposed to do when you want to get off of it?
[/QUOTE]
My mountain bike came with no kickstand, nor would I have wanted one. My gf’s bike and my son’s are both kickstandless as well. When not being ridden, I lean mine against something, or just hold it. It only weighs something like 14 picograms. 
Annual membership fees for credit cards. What, not making enough money off of the interest I’m paying, you have to soak me for a fee too? I didn’t have a lot of choice when I first started rebuilding my awful credit a few years back so I sucked it up and took the hit. Now neither of my cards charges me.
Replacement fee for an expiring debit card. Um, 'scuse me, I have no say over when my debit card expires, where do you get off charging a fee to replace it?
My credit union has recently started charging a fee of $1 per transaction foe debit card transactions over 12 per month. That’s completely ridiculous.
Some of the fees that clients of my company assess on cardholders are scandalous. We do child support cards for one state and the client charges 99 cents per ATM transaction unless the CH uses the client’s ATM. The client has no ATMs in the state. The CH has the option of going inside any bank s/he wants and doing a cash advance for free, but the bank usually charges a $2-$5 fee for that. Another state’s cardholders get charged $1.50 to speak with a live representative. These are people on unemployment and they get hit with a fee to try to clear up problems on their accounts.
The worst are pre-paid debit cards. $10 just to open the account. $5-$8 monthly fee. A fee for every transaction. A fee for checking balances by phone. Fees for talking to representatives. Fees for loading money onto the card. I sometimes wonder how these people sleep at night, and then realize that it’s on with many beautiful ladies on a bed of money.
[QUOTE=Eyebrows 0f Doom]
You’ve been charged shipping on an item you bought in store!? Wow, where was this so I know never to go there.
[/QUOTE]
There’s a chain of furniture stores around here - Jennifer Convertibles, or some such thing - that only displays sofas and beds in their stores, and everything is warehoused on the other end of the state, so you need to pay another couple hundred bucks to have it delivered to the store. Add on another fifty or so if you want it delivered to your home.
Tire shops have you over a barrel with all those extra line items like valves, balancing, filling with nitrogen instead of air, and so on.
Brake shops get you in a whole bunch of ways as well. $69.95 per axle! they advertise, not telling you that this is just the labor and the worst possible set of brake pads available. If you want brakes that will actually stop the car, not shriek and howl like a garbage truck and last more than six months, you need to upgrade. Then they get to upsell you on the little bits of hardware that are already included in the box with the pads when you buy them at Kragen, plus another $69.95 to turn the rotors (not telling you that Kragen would sell you new rotors for $58.95), and twelve bucks for brake cleaner and some environmental fee to mitigate the use of that brake cleaner, and on and on to the point that the $69.95 job turns into $294.83. I’m amazed that they didn’t charge me for the compressed air to drive the wrench.
Next time, I’ll do the brakes in my driveway.
[QUOTE=Eyebrows 0f Doom]
You’ve been charged shipping on an item you bought in store!? Wow, where was this so I know never to go there.
[/QUOTE]
Home Depot, in my case. Except that there was a rebate for the cost of shipping, so though it was a pain, it only cost me a stamp. This was on a cooktop which I could easily have gotten home myself, even if I didn’t bring my truck. They have no inventory in the store, it all comes from a warehouse which no doubt saves them money. OTOH the woman who sold it to me there was very cool, and told me how to get a big discount by coming in at exactly the right day and saying the right magic words. It worked!
[QUOTE=TheLoadedDog]
The cost of using another bank’s ATM.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t mind paying a fee to use another bank’s ATM. Mind you, given that they already have the system in place for their own customers, a fee of $1 is more appropriate than a fee of $3, but, OK, I’ll pay for the convenience.
What pisses me off is paying MY OWN bank for using another bank’s ATM. Yeah, they give me something like four freebees a month, but after that, I have to pay .70 for a transaction that costs something like .005, if that.
[QUOTE=gotpasswords]
There’s a chain of furniture stores around here - Jennifer Convertibles, or some such thing - that only displays sofas and beds in their stores, and everything is warehoused on the other end of the state, so you need to pay another couple hundred bucks to have it delivered to the store. Add on another fifty or so if you want it delivered to your home.
[/QUOTE]
My girlfriend just bought a sofa from them. I actually didn’t think their policy was that unreasonable. Our options were:
$x to have it delivered to our address.
$y to have it delivered to the store, where we could pick it up
Free to go pick it up ourselves at the warehouse (with schedule limitations. They were only available for the public to pick things up a few hours a week.)
y was less than x, but I don’t remember how much. I can see why you might be upset at that, but I also recognize that they can’t keep stock in a showroom, and, even if delivery to the store were free, we probably would have to have to pay to get it delivered to her apartment anyway.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
I don’t mind the various taxes for hotels and such. The hotels can’t do anything about them, and towns clearly want to charge people who aren’t voters. My town does the same thing.
Besides the obvious obnoxious airline fees, I really hate resort fees for hotels. Those are fees for use of resort facilities they charge to everyone, even if the people never use them. They are major ripoffs, and often groups going to the hotel can negotiate them away.
I also am not too fond of high parking fees for resorts in the middle of the desert.
Internet usage fees in hotels are always annoying, especially because budget hotels don’t have them, and expensive hotels do. No way does a bunch of wireless access points and routers and bandwidth cost $10 a day. If the Days Inn can give you this free, why not the Hyatt? (I know the answer - corporate travelers.)
[/QUOTE]
Word.
I don’t get why lower-priced hotels include more stuff (free local phone calls, free internet) than higher-end ones.
One hotel I stayed at charged a fee for using the safe in the room. I pointed out that I had no intention of using the safe. They said to turn around and bend over. Er, they said their insurance company insisted on it.
Basically these fees are ways of raising the price on the item while making it appear lower. They don’t fool anyone, but there ya go.
I’m not upset, per se, at Jennifer’s shipping charges, but they promote themselves as being so inexpensive, then they whack you on the head with those charges.
In comparison, Levitz had most stuff in stock in back, and if they didn’t, they didn’t charge anything extra to have it broght in from the warehouse or another store. Similarly, most mattress places have zero stock in-store, and deliver for free. And quite often, on the same day that you bought the mattress. Is the cost of transportation built into the sales price? Of course it is. But they’re still competitive.
Jennifer, OTOH, wasn’t all that cheap once the freight was added, and pickup at the warehouse wasn’t a viable option because of how far away it is from us. IIRC, the item we were thinking of buying was only stocked in Bakersfield, making our options:
A: Drive all dang day to and from Bakersfield
B: Pay the price and wait for the next regularly-scheduled truck run
C: Buy the sofa at La-Z-Boy, where it was in-stock, less expensive overall, and they loaded it onto our truck.
If you want to have small stores or showrooms with minimal or no stock, then you should suck up the cost of getting merchandise to the store as a cost of business. You don’t have to deliver it to customers’ homes for free, but you should at least meet them halfway.
[QUOTE=TheLoadedDog]
The cost of using another bank’s ATM.
This was free the first time I saw it in the 80s. Seemed reasonable to me, too: two of this country’s biggest banks got together to provide a service to their customers that would make it more convenient to those customers and also put the squeeze on the other banks. So, good business sense.
Then they put the fee in place. So that sucked sufficiently anyway. But it gets worse…
I drive to my suburb’s main street to use the ATM. I have to use the ATM, because they signed me up - back in the 90s, in the early days of shitty bank fees - to a promised fee-free account with the condition that I did everything electronically (would be $4 for a teller transaction). After I signed up, they reneged on their promise. Anyway, I drive to the ATM, and it’s fucking OUT OF ORDER. I can wait in a twenty-minute queue for a teller and be charged $4, or I can waste my own time and petrol driving to another suburb and trying again, or I can go to the other ATM and be charged a “non-bank fee”.
For fuck’s sake? Wot? If you must have that fee, at least have your software capable of waiving it if the sole ATM belonging to your bank in that suburb is out of order. You fuck up, so I have to pay?
Pricks.
[/QUOTE]
My bank will credit your account $5 if you have to go to the window because the ATM is out of order, or if you have to wait in line more than ten minutes. Imagine, my bank paying me money for their problems!
This one got me the last time I signed up at the gym – there was a yearly fee (somewhere in the $10 to $15 range) for washing the freakin’ gym towels!
[QUOTE=gotpasswords]
Brake shops get you in a whole bunch of ways as well.
<snip>
Next time, I’ll do the brakes in my driveway.
[/QUOTE]
Word. And QFT and everything else. When I discovered how mindbogglingly easy it is to fix disc brakes – everything from replacing the pads to replacing the rotors – I actually got pissed off that I’d been charged so much for it in the past. I’m going to teach my ex, the master of the $500+ brake job, how to do this delightful task.
[QUOTE=Eyebrows 0f Doom]
You’ve been charged shipping on an item you bought in store!? Wow, where was this so I know never to go there.
[/QUOTE]
Just about any where in Abitibi(northern Quebec) except for the national retailer of which there is only one in our small town most of the rest are charging you shipping on floor stock.
I went to buy some scaffolding the other week and asked how much shipping was going to cost me. The owner questioned me about having my own truck. I said yes I’ll pick it up here but what is the shipping to the store going to cost me. He told me that places the charge shipping for floor stock really chap his ass and he refuses to charge extra for shipping said it was part of his business expense and couldn’t understand why this is charged as an extra around these parts. He’s been getting a lot more of my business lately, and a genuinely nice guy to boot.
Woohoo 600 posts and it only took five years.
I work in the banking industry as a technician, although I don’t have to work on ATM’s, thank og. They are very high maintenance and I feel sorry for the poor bastards who have to fix them in sub zero temps.
These machines have to deal with heat and humidity and sometimes brutally cold temperatures.
I’m not defending banks at all. Some of their processing fees are nearly criminal but I can understand the ATM surcharge.
[QUOTE=Morbo]
Restocking Fee. Specifically for me, Circuit City. I bought a printer there that was defective, and was charged a FIFTEEN PERCENT restocking fee. IOW they turned a $45 profit from selling me a $300 broken printer. But if I bought another printer from them, no problem. Uh…thanks, I think I’ll look elsewhere.
[/QUOTE]
While I do not agree with CC’s restocking policy, if you had exchanged for another of the same printer, then there would also be no restocking fee. Maybe that is what you meant by “bought another printer”, but I don’t regard swapping a broken printer for a (supposedly) working one as being the same as buying another.
This is one where I don’t understand how it could possibly be legal. Local banks charge a dishonour fee of $35 if you write a check that bounces. That’s fine, you should have known better. But they also change the same fee to the account the check is deposited into! How the hell are you supposed to avoid that? You have no way of telling what the other bugger’s balance is before you deposit it.
[QUOTE=amarone]
While I do not agree with CC’s restocking policy, if you had exchanged for another of the same printer, then there would also be no restocking fee. Maybe that is what you meant by “bought another printer”, but I don’t regard swapping a broken printer for a (supposedly) working one as being the same as buying another.
[/QUOTE]
Your confidence is better than mine. It didn’t get that far.
[QUOTE=Little Plastic Ninja]
Word. And QFT and everything else. When I discovered how mindbogglingly easy it is to fix disc brakes – everything from replacing the pads to replacing the rotors – I actually got pissed off that I’d been charged so much for it in the past. I’m going to teach my ex, the master of the $500+ brake job, how to do this delightful task.
[/QUOTE]
It’s an easy task if the car is new, or you don’t live in a rust-prone area. I’ve done brakes before on newer vehicles - and yes, it’s easy. But try it on a 10 year old vehicle and its a crapshoot - could be easy, or you could be dealing with frozen bolts, etc. that a torque wrench won’t even faze. Can’t get in there with a breaker bar because there is not enough room. Gaah!