After Internet outcry, Verizon backtracks, drops plans to charge $2 “convenience fee”

Chalk up anoth­er vic­to­ry for the Inter­net:

Ver­i­zon Wire­less has decid­ed it will not insti­tute the fee for online or tele­phone sin­gle pay­ments that was announced ear­li­er this week.

The com­pa­ny made the deci­sion in response to cus­tomer feed­back about the plan, which was designed to improve the effi­cien­cy of those trans­ac­tions. The com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to encour­age cus­tomers to take advan­tage of the numer­ous sim­ple and con­ve­nient pay­ment meth­ods it provides.

“At Ver­i­zon, we take great care to lis­ten to our cus­tomers. Based on their input, we believe the best path for­ward is to encour­age cus­tomers to take advan­tage of the best and most effi­cient options, elim­i­nat­ing the need to insti­tute the fee at this time,” said Dan Mead, pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Ver­i­zon Wireless.

A peti­tion on Change.org demand­ing that Ver­i­zon Wire­less drop the fee had already gar­nered around 100,000 sig­na­tures by Fri­day afternoon.

It’s now clos­ing in on 130,000.

If Ver­i­zon was tru­ly pay­ing atten­tion — and lis­ten­ing to its cus­tomers — it would nev­er have attempt­ed to intro­duce this ridicu­lous $2 “con­ve­nience fee” in the first place. Still, Ver­i­zon exec­u­tives are clear­ly smarter than Bank of Amer­i­ca’s head hon­chos. Instead of allow­ing the furor to fes­ter for weeks, they’ve quelled it by revers­ing course and aban­don­ing their plans quickly.

It real­ly is absurd that finan­cial insti­tu­tions in this coun­try are allowed to get away with slap­ping such high charges on trans­ac­tions. When we at NPI accept a con­tri­bu­tion from a donor, we don’t get to keep one hun­dred cents of every dol­lar. Instead, we have to pay a tax to Visa, Mas­ter­Card, Amer­i­can Express, or Dis­cov­er. And unlike real tax­es, which fund need­ed pub­lic ser­vices, the de fac­to tax­es col­lect­ed by Visa and its rivals are pock­et­ed as profits.

Sad­ly, it’s got­ten to the point where a dol­lar is no longer a dol­lar in this country.

A mer­chant or non­prof­it that takes cred­it cards either has to pass the per-trans­ac­tion expens­es along to donors or cus­tomers, or eat those expens­es as a cost of doing busi­ness. Cred­it card pro­cess­ing fees are a not insignif­i­cant expense for any firm or orga­ni­za­tion that does ecommerce.

And big banks are only try­ing to make a bad sit­u­a­tion worse. If they could get away with charg­ing to process checks and even cash pay­ments, they would.