• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 3, 2012

Take note, all you mobile “convenience fee” nickel and dimers: Consumers are on to you. In record time, Verizon Wireless backed off a planned policy change that would have charged customers $2 to pay their bill online. The company announced before the holiday that it would not enact the change after all, but it took an online petition and the threat of regulator scrutiny to reverse its course.

We always thought that digital payment was cheaper for companies than traditional paper billing, which required printing, postage and check processing. Apparently, there wasn’t enough savings for Verizon after figuring in credit card charges. The policy was supposed to drive people toward fee-free payment methods like Autopay and electronic checks.

Resistance from consumers sparked the controversy when news of the planned 2012 policy change leaked to the press. According to Change.org, which hosted the online petition, consumer Molly Katchpole used the site to pressure Verizon into retreating from its plans. Katchpole attracted over 95,000 co-signers within hours of the petition launch, change.org claims. She had been featured recently in Time magazine’s Person of the Year story on “The Protestor” for her efforts to petition Bank of America to rescind its fees.

I got nabbed myself this weekend by a mobile ticketing “convenience fee” courtesy of Fandango. The popular and otherwise helpful mobile movie finder and ticket provider recently instituted true mobile ticketing. At select Regal Theaters  you can forego the ticket pick-up kiosk and box office entirely and go directly to the ticket taker outside the theater. Purchasing the two tickets for me and my wife rendered a QR code that the taker scanned on two tries, so we escaped the New Year’s lines. All well and good, but this convenience cost me an extra $2.50. Huh? Didn’t I just make money for Fandango and circumvent human labor and ticket printing for Regal? I paid a 10% premium not to stand on line?

Maybe someone else sees the value in that, but this experiment in mobile ticketing is the first and last time I will use mobile payments for tickets until the charge is removed. Charging a “convenience fee” for a paperless process we have been told for years is supposed to save us all money and shrink our carbon footprint is an affront that consumers will not and should not endure.