Cranky Customer

I too am at the end of my lease and have my tales of woe gathered over the years at the mercy of the Pitney Bowes corporation. Their late fees are outrageous. I'd always noticed that their invoices arrived a week to 10 days after their "billing" date, leaving little time to cut a check and mail back to meet their 20 Day policy. They were downright nasty when I mentioned my suspicions to customer service.

It's amazing how similar many of these posts are. I find it difficult to understand how a company can continue to survive using such unethical business practices. I arrived here after googling Pitney Bowes Evil, I was so frustrated with them.

My lease expired a month ago, but they did me the "courtesy" of automatically rolling it over for another quarter. No big deal except I had wanted to let the lease expire and move on to try other things like online stamps or even visit the post office. I assumed they would contact me. Naaah.

After being bounced around a couple times to finally get transferred to the right person to "help me", what I got was an extremely persuasive sales pitch. The first offer was to cut my lease amount in 1/2 - for the same meter! Well why couldn't they do that before? Her final offer was an astounding 80 percent off what I'd been paying. At that point I didn't care if it was free, get it out of here just to be rid of this company.

I told the salesperson (definitely not a customer service rep) - who had, by the way, complete access to my payment history for both the lease and postage, that, to paraphrase myself here: "no offense to her, I understood she was doing her job, and a fine one at that, but that she worked for a really sleazy company." That was the only time she didn't have a ready scripted response.

At this point I will happily pay my "it's in the lease agreement fine print" $100 fee to get them to accept their own meter back. Good riddance and never again will I deal with Pitney Bowes in any way, and I plan to advise all business colleagues, friends, family and anyone who will listen, to avoid Pitney Bowes like a plague.

I arrived here after googling Pitney Bowes repair problems.

I am in my 4th year of a 6 year lease with a broken B900 meter. The date won't hold and it has leaked red ink everywhere for a couple of years now (yes I use PB ink cartridges). The cover over the date doesn't lock on anymore, the attachment sealer is raggedy & barely seals.

I called & they said my equipment was obsolete so they could not repair it. So I found a new piece of equipment equivalent to mine for $79.99 a month & requested this. They told me that the rental price on that piece of equipment is $129.00 per month -- the other price is for new customers.

But they won't come fix mine (I'm even willing to pay) & they won't replace it either, even though it's obsolete. He said I will have to pay off my lease in full at $210 per quarter for 2 years then I can get a new one at that price. He was rude, had a take it or leave it attitude.

If this equipment is being leased, why won't they fix it? Wouldn't that be considered a breach of contract?

I don't really understand the run-around; when an organization I work for discontinued using the old Pitney-Bowes postage machine, Pitney Bowes shipped us a box with packing materials and instruction. We packed it up, affixed the postage-paid label, and shipped it off to them. Like you, we didn't have people in the office on a regular basis, so this was much more convenient than trying to synchronize our schedule with a pick-up person's.

And I don't remember what the terms of the lease were, but it was a pretty simple matter to call and say we didn't want the machine anymore. The only "issue" was we had a postage credit, and it took about a year for me to bother to call P-B and have them refund the credit.

Pitney-Bowes has no need to worry about any obsolete machinery, as they are doing the postage on the PayPal website...it is their software that handles the postage. They are going to continue to make money thru the post office one way or another, and not care about customers or service any more in the future than they have in the past.

Many years ago I decided to try a P-B meter for my tax practice. As you can imagine, I do most of my mailing between February and April. P-B offered a free 3 months with a 2 year lease contract. I sent them a check for $50 postage and ordered an insert that would print a flag image on my mail. I got the flag. That was all I got. They claimed they delivered the postage meter to my home. It never got here. Meanwhile my 3 month free service turned into full payment due for the first 3 months. So much for an introductory offer.

I called repeatedly complaining that I would not pay for a service I had not received let alone forgo the promised 3 months free. They continued to tell me they would “look into the problem”. They also continued to bill me for 2 years even though I did not have a postage meter and was not using their service. I finally got through to a district manager type who promised to stop the billing and refund my $50 postage. It eventually stopped but their parting shot to me was: “If you ever find your postage meter, remember it now has $50 of our postage in it.”

Some time later P-B bought out my commercial printer in Texas. I stopped doing business with them for fear that P-B would screw up my business even more. Darn, they were a good printer.

In the UK, all you are required to do is to state in a letter to the firm that "unless they pick the machine up with in a certain time (something reasonable, e.g. within a month of posting the letter) that you will dispose of it."

In the alternative, you can start levying a storage charge until that charge reaches the estimated value of the machine - then it's yours.

After a lot of phone calls, which had as much success as you did, friend of mine did this with the storage charge option with a television he had ceased to rent. About 6 months after the letter had been sent, a representative called round and was shown a copy of the letter (sent by recorded delivery.)

My friend told him that the storage charge of one pound ($2) a day had exceeded the value of the television and that it had been sold to recoup costs.

He heard no more about it. My friend is a lawyer.

Back in the '80s, I worked for an agency of Friden Alcatel, a competitor of Pitney Bowes. They had 93% of the market and we had 7%. I think the company is Italia now. Back then, in West Michigan, my sales territory covered those of about 8 PB sales people. Their customers knew the sales people lied, but they didn't trust a smaller company. The PB sales people frequently told users of larger machines that the lease was expiring and it was time to get more modern equipment. Our company was using the leasing company PB had used until a couple years earlier. We were able to get the accurate expiration date. When the township I lived in was told their lease was expiring, I offered to confirm the lease date. I was told it wasn't necessary and I should deliver replacement equipment.

A couple weeks later, I got a call from the township officer telling me that the PB lease had over a year to run and that I should remove our equipment. Unfortunately, the lease was signed with our company and there was no way. He did remember that I had offered to confirm the PB expiration date, but I still came off as the bad guy because I wouldn't take my equipment back. One of the PB sales people told a bank officer that I had been in jail for armed robbery. The bank officer knew that I had been an IRS agent and could not have been in jail for anything. I won't take any more space with the many more stories I have from just over two years of competing with PB.

PB is regulated somewhat by the Post Office. Problems with them should be reported to the local Postmaster.

I also had a Pitney Bowes postage machine, which turned out to be very expensive. But I can't say that the company misrepresented anything. My chief problem was that the little tiny $80.00 ink cartridges lasted about 2 months, and the labels for envelopes were $90. I have a very small, one person business, and this was specifically marketed to me as being cost-effective for small businesses. It wasn't. The return process was easy, but I would never try their service again. There are too many hidden costs.

I have to comment that PB is really not getting away with anything that other companies aren't getting away with. My satellite company has told me that my receiver is obsolete and can't be fixed and therefore I need to shell out money for a new one. I used to work tech support for one of the major computer companies and I actually ended up quitting last week because I was tired of wanting to help people resolve their issues and continuously ran into higher ups in my corporation who only cared about their bottom line of making money. I have uttered the words "what happened to customer satisfaction?" on more than one occasion. My boss actually lectured me at one point about what the bottom line of business was (to make money) I told him that I supposed the difference was that I grew up around small family owned businesses where humanity was still a factor.

The bottom line is that PB knows that all major corporations treat their customers the way that PB does. Like the one post above said, they find the percentage of unsatisfied customers acceptable. I don't know how many unhappy computer owners I talked into thinking their situation was acceptable while silently screaming to myself that it wasn't. I actually risked my job on more than one occasion by telling customers that if they don't get the answer they want to escalate. I can see how that would even be a problem with PB when nobody returns your calls.

My experience with Bitmee Toes (our nickname at the office for Pitney Bowes) relates to a direct mail addressing machine, not a postage meter. We leased a machine that was supposed to address 4,000 labels per hour. The machine arrived and technicians came on a daily basis but were never able to get the machine to work. Finally, they gave up, took the machine back and we bought another machine that worked from another company. Now the fun begins. I had paid a first and last month's deposit on the lease. I never received them back. They continued to bill me monthly even though I had never completed the lease by doing a "verbal approval" that I had the machine and that it worked. I was billed for two years for a machine that never worked and I no longer had. Soon I was turned over for collection and received a bad D&B report. I am still trying to remove that blemish from my financial record at Dunn and Bradstreet.