Charging DSL Customers Retroactively

from the how-to-win-friends... dept

If you happen to be running a business and want to piss off all your customers really quickly, take a page from the playbook of BigNet. Because of their own stupidity, they didn't realize that the FCC was forcing them to pay an extra fee for almost a year. When they did realize, they decided to "pass the fee along" to the customers. Mistake number one was instead of just including this "fee" in the regular service charge, they pulled it out as a separate line item. While this is a bit more honest, it does open them up to much more criticism when they made mistake number 2. They decided to charge all their customer retroactively for the charges of the past year. Suddenly, people are getting their DSL bills with a huge extra charge and no explanation. It gets even funnier as you read the quotes of the execs from BigNet try to explain this one away. Exactly how is this "making lemons from lemonade"?