I've long espoused the notion that in roughly 9.8 of ten cases, when a business or government organization touts changes for the benefit of you, the customer, you'd best hold on to your wallet. Most often, changes are made primarily for the advantage of the organization enacting them, and usually, they have to do with reducing costs - to the service provider, not to you. If some real convenience or saving for consumers happens to be a by-product of changes, the perpetrators will gladly play them up. If not, they'll invent some and present them as benefits anyway.
This idea has recently been restated by Washington Post local columnist John Kelly; he says it well, so it's worth a read. I liked this line in particular:
“Improvements” are what companies do when they want to save money. The word is synonymous with “to better serve you.” You know how that one goes: “In an effort to better serve you, we are burning your village, killing your livestock and sowing your fields with salt.”
Everyone has his/her own examples. One of my favorites, because it's so widespread, is the push to have us all receive account statements and other financial documents electronically on line, rather than via paper in the mail. In some cases it's convenience-neutral, but in many it's a serious hassle. Have you tried, for example, to balance your credit card statement against your receipts and your own records in (say) Quicken? The switching back and forth between windows takes me twice as long. The bank's change may save them the cost of paper, envelope, and postage; it might in fact save trees (this is the way the bank presents it to me of course) but not if I ultimately print out a paper copy anyway to save time. Presto, that cost of paper and ink (both more expensive to me than to the bank which buys it in bulk) has been transferred to me.
I think the reason this works pretty well for the banks, though, is generational change. I compare receipts, charges, and the like, from my credit card. I'd guess that a high percentage of people in my age group probably still do. But I know a high percentage of younger people who do not. Call them the trust-but-don't-verify generation.
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