Consumers Confronted with an Avalanche of Fees and Extra Charges

We all know the scenario. You see an ad in the newspaper for some terrific tires on sale so you go to the shop and get a new set. Then you find that the price that was quoted in the newspaper was jacked up with charges for taxes, balancing and rotation fees, and installation fees. And it's not just tires either. AT&T is notorious for adding a whole list of additional charges to your phone bill. And I bet if you look hard enough you might even find an extra one of two on those phone services that claim not to have any. Airlines, hotels, rent-a-cars, banks, the list goes on and on and is growing. Have you ever wondered what the "handling" part of shipping and handling was? Or, my favorite: an "administrative" charge. Wait, you're going to charge me how much extra for someone to put something in an envelope and mail it to me? Isn't that supposed to be part of the job in the first place? I can see what is coming next. Companies will have an additional charge when you call in and want to talk to a "real' person.

According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, (www.stltoday.com) the problem is spreading like wildfire and becoming a real nuisance to consumers. To "read the fine print" has always been a good idea, but a lot of these extra charges are undisclosed or buried so far down in the small print that nobody ever reads them. And that's exactly what the companies are counting on. It's like the truth in advertising "disclosure" law. It seems that you can claim pretty much anything in the body of the ad itself as long as you say just the opposite in the fine print. My favorite is: after a commercial raves on and on about a product and then those words come scrolling across the bottom of your screen: "results not typical." As a matter of factm, out of a million people who have used the product, only one had those kinds of results.

Over the years, consumers ignored most of these small hidden charges. A 2006 study finds that the average adult pays some $942 a year in surcharges and hidden costs. Bob Sullivan, author of "Gotcha Capitalism" calls the fees the "fastest-growing white collar crime in America." But a lot of people are getting tired of the ruse, calling to the companies to complain, going to websites like Complaints.com or Planetfeedback.com to voice their opinion. Some are even going as far as to launch class action lawsuits against the companies.

Banks were set up to reap some 438 billion in deposit account fees in 2007. Maybe it's time that a little bit of that money stays in your pocket.