Free with Fee and Fee with Free

Take note: from this day forward this column will be an official fee-free zone.
No matter how tough things get for me, NML readers will not be required to pay service fees, late fees, user fees, or ink fees.*
It is not that I’m an especially caring guy; it’s just that I am hoping for a little reciprocity. I scratch your back, you lay off the fees.
It used to be just the government that required fees, but when businesses saw how a few fees here and there could improve their bottom line, they got on board, big time. You can owe five cents to the shoe repairmen but if you are late paying, he adds a $25 fee. You can have six bucks in your checking account but when they take out your seven dollar monthly fee you’re overdrawn, so they add on a 25-dollar fee.
It’s easy to see how lucrative the fee business is, and easy to understand how everybody wants to get their share.
My friend Dan is a real hospitable guy. You can drop by his house any time of the day or night and he’ll be slapping you on the back, offering you a beer and a slice of cold pizza. I used to drop by quite often too, until he instituted his hospitality fee.
“Don’t worry about it,” he assured me when I called the other week, concerned: “you’re always welcome in our house. It’s just that having a relaxed attitude and an open door has its costs, and we need to recoup some of those costs.”
To his credit, Dan was up front about his new fees, or at least as up front as anyone is when it comes to fees. He pointed out to me that on the same door mat that you step on as you enter his front door, right under the big bold embroidered “Welcome”, is a hand-stitched, single-thread of red that spells out his new fees.
The kid who used to mow my lawn has gotten in to the act too. He used to charge me $35 to cut my grass once a month. But when I got his last bill he had added a $5 fee to cover the cost of dumping the grass, a fee of $5 per hour for pollution control, a $5 surcharge for accidental death or dismemberment insurance, and a gasoline usage fee of $12.75.
Then, when I balked at the bill, he added a late fee.
That used to be my biggest gripe about fees – that they were a dishonest way of adding to the stated costs of products and services. I like to know the price of things, up front, so when mysterious fees and surcharges start showing up, it irks me.
But it’s gotten to the point where there are so many additional fees and hidden charges that it’s no longer an issue of fairness – now it’s about real money.
In Plymouth alone you pay fees to swim, to burn, and for your children to take the bus to school. Then you pay a fee to park, to ride, and to take your trash to the dump.
You want to build a deck –there’s a fee.
Want to tear it down and try again, pay a fee.
Want to hire someone who knows what they’re doing: pay another fee.
You pay the state a fee to register your car, a fee for a license plate, an excise tax (oh my Lord, what honesty, they call it a tax!) on the same car, and a fee for satellite radio so that when you’re burning up that expensive gas you are not commercially interrupted.
Now there’s a fee I am willing to pay. When I’m whining out loud in my car the last thing I want is to have to listen to someone else’s whining.

So where was I? Oh, whining about fees..

You pay fees if you’re late. You pay fees if you’re early.
You pay fees if you’re local, and fees if you’re from out of state.
If there’s anything you enjoy that you get for free, don’t blink because when you open your eyes again you’ll have to pay a fee.
Remember when television was free?
Remember when you could just drive to the beach and swim, for free?
Even things that are supposedly free are not free of fees.
Today the dictionary definition of free should be, ‘Free with Purchase’, or ‘Free with Fee’, or ‘Free after Rebate’.

*Oh, by the way: you can read this for free, and feel free to make copies (feel free but remember there’s a fee for each one).