Robbing me on a “technicality”

My favorite bank is charging for printing account statement online. Get this – charging me for printing the statement from the comfort of my home; using my own printer and paper; on my laptop (pc). Yet the bank does not charge for viewing the statement online. But once you press the print button you activate the shylock in the banking application. Consider that the statement is already on my screen and technically already downloaded to my PC and that I can find myriad other ways to print it instead of using their print button. The bank should rather consider it as a VAS (Value Added Service) or state explicitly that they will be charging for it (it’s possibly stated in some obscure brochure which no one has a copy of anymore). And come to that, sometimes a service provider needs to look beyond immediate gratification i.e., the potential returns (after some sort of research to find out how many customers actually use the service – in this case the “print” option) to the amount of goodwill/free adverts via the happy customer exercising their bragging rights by telling friends and colleagues alike about the VASes offered by his/her bank at no extra costs to the customer. This will utlimately bring the bank more returns than the paltry hackle-raising sum they are likely to arm-twist from a few disgruntled customers who have no choice but to have the said amount debited from their accounts.

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