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Tarsnap: Our costs just went down, so we're lowering our pricing for customers too!

Comcast: Our costs just went down. Effective immediately, we are adding a new cash management fee to your bill to cover our costs of handling all this new cash.




I was once billed by Washington Mutual for depositing too much cash with their bank tellers. Can't make this stuff up.


Cash management actually does cost money. You expect bills you get from them to be definitely issued by authorized representatives of the US government and bills you deposit with them to not disappear, right? Those are not naturally occurring properties of green paper.

Below scale, cash management is thrown in just to get people's business, but at scale, it costs what it costs. Walmart, which has substantially more problems than you on that score, reportedly spends millions of dollars every year just dealing with pennies.


Cost of doing business. But I'm sure they spend many more millions on consulting figuring out how to pass that along.


The "cost of doing business" all gets passed along to the consumer, inevitably. That's how businesses work. The consumer has to cover the "cost[s] of doing business" and then some, or companies don't make any money.


I'm using the phrase to mean something that's inconvenient for a company but ultimately necessary to make more money. Not just any task that's part of everyday business. But maybe I'm mistaken.


"You have too much money. Here, we'll help you by taking some of it off your hands..." ?


They complained that they had to handle too much physical cash and that there was a limit to how much I could deposit in a given month (into a business account, mind you).

I can't think of TOO many more first world problems than that, to be honest...


You realize that they have to pay people to move that cash around, count it, double check it etc, and then they have to pay to store it and maintain it? People don't work for nothing, and storage doesn't cost nothing.


It would be true if they charged a percent of the money deposited for every dollar, it's not the case here.


It might be. My (Canadian) bank's "small business banking" plan charges $2.25 per $1000 of cash deposits beyond the first few thousand/month. (And $2.25 per $100 of coins.)

Of course, if I ever deposited cash I would be on a different banking plan; but it's not entirely unheard-of.




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