Time Warner charged Nick $0.23 for the Home Shopping Network coupon included in his monthly bill. The “Adhsn fee” listed on his bill was an oversight, according to a Time Warner representative, who defended the omnipresent charge as something that is usually “just bundled somewhere else.” Nick writes:
I’m a Time Warner customer in Charlotte, NC and recently got my August bill. Looking over it as usual, there is a new fee “ADHSN Fee” of 23 cents. I know FCC and taxes, but ADHSN I didn’t comprehend. After calling customer service the agent was perplexed and finally realized that they were charging me for the Home Shopping Network ad/coupon they included in my bill. Apparently, they claim this charge has always been there, it’s just bundled somewhere else. I think they are full of crap. Plus he claimed he couldn’t remove it. So now I have to pay to be advertised to. 23 cents to 100,000 cable customers is $23,000 to put little useless ad in my cable bill. Shouldn’t the home shopping network foot the bill?
Telecoms and cable companies revel in passing every imaginable cost on to the consumer, aided by staff neologists who obscure fees with nonsensical and misleading names. Fighting a $0.23 charge is about principles. If you really want it off your bill, call back and escalate to a supervisor.
We called Time Warner to ask if charging for coupons was standard practice. Though they have yet to get back to us with an official comment, one Time Warner representative offhandedly remarked: “Oh God, I hope it’s not standard practice.”
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I just looked at my TW bill and it does include a Adhsn fee of $0.22. Then I looked at last month’s bill. The total bill was exactly the same as last month, and it didn’t have the Adhsn fee. What I found is that last month, the Franchise Fee was $0.62, where as this month it is only $0.40.
So $0.22 + $0.40 = $0.62. So, yeah I guess they usually do bundle the fee in somewhere else. Since the total cost is the same as last month, I’m not going to bother with it.
@zackola: What I wonder is if people in NC get their bills online and not by paper are they still getting charged this ADHSN fee?
Folks … there’s a simple, simple solution to this. Two words:
“Mail Fraud”
Another phrase:
“Continuing criminal enterprise”
Another word:
“Conspiracy”
And just for fun, let’s toss in an acronym:
“RICO”
Stop calling customer service plebes in India and start trolling for ambulance-chaser-type lawyers with nothing better to do than to file class-action lawsuits.
There’s MILLIONS in this for the right attorney smart enough to make enough trouble so that the Verizons and AT&Ts and TMobile capo’s will pay you to go away.
Wow, $137, that’s normal? I have Comcast high speed broadband and basic cable that gives me all the local and network channels (like SciFi, History, CNN – about 70 channels) and I only pay $60. My phone is only $25, all after taxes/fees. So if you have a bundle you’re paying another $52 for digital HD? Seems pricey.
I think it stands for “Ad HSN”, not Adhesion. They completely spell out all the other charge descriptions, why would they decide to cut 3 letters out of “Adhesion”?
@Duncito:
That sounds like you have a Motorola box. That was advertising that was built into the box from Adelphia. A fried of mine has the same box. In the Time Warner Cable areas in Southern California there is no such advertising on the guide of the cable box.
I’ll be checking my bill tonight. I long ago gave up trying to understand all the crap in there. But this is special.
You’ve got to be kidding. Paying to receive ads in the bill? They ought to be paying me.
your bill is $137 a month and you really care about $0.23? don’t you have a quadrillion channels to be watching instead?
These charges add up.
A few months ago I noticed a $4.95 charge for “wireless internet” on our ever increasing bill. As all our computers are hardwired, I was concerned about this charge. I checked my online bill, and it showed this charge going back the entire viewable 6 months.
(When we first got TWC internet, the install tech OPENED MY COMPUTER and installed a wireless card, despite my placing a roll of CAT-5 cable next to my computer. This card thing never worked right, was NOT requested or needed, and I ended up plugging in the cable myself.)
We did NOT have a wireless internet charge on the bill right after the internet was installed over 3 years ago, so I don’t know how long I had been getting this charge.
I called TWC and requested they removed this charge. They removed only 3 months worth of this charge.
At five bucks a month, this charge could have been equivalent to a few months of cable service!
I see all these commercials for getting a full YEAR of service for a fraction of what I pay. Of course, it’s only a new customer incentive. I would think these companies would offer a customer retention rate occasionally! Although in my area, the other option for cable tv is Cox Cable, a scandal-plagued company that doesn’t offer the channels we require….
@Duncito: My comcast box added that ad a few months after I got it, very annoying.
All you Motorola-box people who hate that ad at the bottom of the menu: do you not have “page down” buttons on your remotes?
(I loathed my Moto DVR box until I learned that if you never, ever turn it off, it actually sort-of works. Now I just sneer at it occasionally, and when the drive starts to fill up, threaten to replace it with a TiVo HD.)
@bcgrote:
It sounds to me that you have Time Warner’s networking service? Or do you have your own router? They call it wireless regardless if you use the wireless portion of the router.
Why not just label it a “customer punishment fee” or a “business incompetence fee” or a “CEO extortion fee”? I think those are all accurate to some degree…this goes right along with Northwest Airlines “Ticket Counter fees” and Bank “Lobby Service Fees”.
Seriously, though, someone should really spread this all over YouTube and give them the publicity mega-Black eye they so richly deserve for this. And then file a mega-calss action lawsuit for false billing.
I hope they get also ten bazillion angry calls over this and whoever’s bright idea this was is escorted out of the building post haste…maybe it will make them think twice about doing the same thing when they then inevitably go to work for Comcast, Qwest or DirectTV network.
@beyond: My Comcast bill was over $150 a month for a while. My roommate had HBO, DVR, and digital cable when I moved in, so we just split the bill each month. When she moved out, I dumped HBO, digital cable, and DVR (I would have kept the DVR, except Comcast kept trying to charge me $5 a month extra for HD DVR when A) I don’t have an HD TV and B) Comcast does not offer HD service in my area [we're somewhat rural]). My bill now is $62 and change for just cable Internet and standard cable TV, but that’s because I got a promotional price for the Internet for 6 months. Right now, I pay $19.99 for Internet and $42.75 for standard cable. When my 6 months is up, my Internet will go back to $42.95 again.
As much as I hate TimeWarner, I think people are looking into this a bit too much.
Was it a mistake to include this on the bill? Yes. Should they have credited it when questions about it? Absolutely. Should they continue to pass this cost on to their customers? OF COURSE!
Every business has its operating expenses that it pays for out of the revenue it receives from its paying customers–its just not usually that transparent.
Corporations exist to make a profit and as much as we’d like them to provide everything at cost to us, it ain’t going to happen. Aside from the slap in the face of being made to realize that you are paying to be advertised to, it really shouldn’t matter that they are passing ad costs on to you versus the cost of the chairs their employees sit in for example. All of their costs are passed on to you to some extent. This is true of ANY business, not just TW.
[www2.state.id.us]
Apparently in Idaho, you can accept an unordered item as a free gift, and tell them you will not be paying for it. So maybe you could dock .23 off your bill!