Cranky Customer

I hope some class action lawyers read this letter.

We have had multiple problems with Pitney Bowes, which we call "Pitney Bowels." Pass it on! One is that they absolutely rape the customer on supplies, like the stick-on postage strips.

However, a more interesting scam is that we recently found that Pitney-Bowels had added to our bills, in an inconspicuous way, a "service contract" which we had never requested. For a cheap folder worth perhaps $90, they had added a charge each month adding up to $70 a year! I demanded proof that I had ever ordered such a service and they claimed they destroy all their records after a few years. I do not believe anything they say. I got nothing resembling a straight answer from them.

I think, but cannot prove,that there was simply a computerized mechanism to automatically add such contracts onto customer's bills. If someone scrutinized and caught them, presumably Bowels would stop the charge and claim there had been some innocent error. But the "error" would slip through in many or most cases, automatically cheating the customer for years.

If any energetic lawyer out there wishes to pursue this as a class action case, perhaps you can provide your contact information to the moderator to pass on to me, and I will be happy to talk to you.

Or perhaps---- dare I hope? some whistleblower within Bowels will know the details of this, or of other possible shenanigans, and spill his or her guts.

In passing, I have always understood that false invoicing was mail fraud as a matter of law.

By the way, if you do have an account with Pitney bowels, and want to stay with them, here's a way to save some money. The customer representatives have broad authority to sharply reduce their bloated monthly rental and service charges. Just threaten to cancel and go to a competitor, and watch the charges plummet.

This is in answer to Gregory's comment of 23 April 07:

200 calls a day? Even if you only get through to 80 of your client list that still leaves (on average) six minutes a call in an eight-hour day, including the dialing & ring time.

Lest you think I don't know what you do, my job is in-bound call work, and I've done that for the past 2-1/2 years. The lines of business included Receivables (read: collections) for a cell-phone provider. I doubt you could find, as a group, a more whiny set of people. That said, I think I can say that I've had maybe 5% or so be as whiny as you claim your P-B clients to be. Certainly, my group has been grumpy & there have been some memorable examples of kids trapped in adult bodies, but most are embarrassed, apologetic, & willing to pay for the (past-due, remember) services they have already used.

There's a difference: my example group received their services. The P-B customers did not, were promised things not delivered, were refused the dignity of any sort of settlement except 'put up with it'.

Maybe this is the one-hundredth of one percent of an otherwise perfectly happy client base. Maybe. But, I would like to remind you, Gregory, that the folks in congress have a rule of thumb: for every letter they receive concerning something important to that constituent, there are at least 100 that feel about as strongly the same way, but didn't quite get around to writing.

My job now? I provide over-the-phone tech support for a satellite-based internet provider. I get my share of grumpy customers there, too. Sometimes I have to explain I cannot fix it over the phone & they will need to pay a technician to come out & fix the hardware. On average I'm able to get about 60-70% back online by the end of the phone call. Of the remainder, they are split about even between being understanding about the labor charge & being grumpy about it. I understand that, and I do the best I can to avoid needless trouble calls.

And never once have I needed to change a diaper on a customer, Gregory.

I'm in the exact same situation right now with Hasler-Ascom, PB's big competitor. We have a postage machine so old, huge, and clunky, that no one would ever want it, but we can't throw it away, and they won't come pick it up. Just wanted to let people know that if you go to the competition, things aren't any better over there.

A number of years ago a company I worked for had a problem getting another company to pick up unneeded rented equipment. While they weren't being charged for the equipment, the owning company wouldn't come pick it up.

I solved the problem - I used a fork lift to put it on the back of a pickup truck, and a co-worker and I drove it over to their office, and told them they could either get a fork lift to take it off the back of the truck, or we would push it off in their driveway. Either way, the equipment was being returned.
They had a forklift out and took it off the truck in about ten minutes. Problem solved.

I had the exact same problem with Pitney Bowes when we switched to an internet based postage meter, only the continued to charge us the lease payment, after we had paid the settlement fee to get out of the contract. It continued for seven months before they finally came and got the infernal machine, and they are still trying to make us pay the installments for all of the months they refused to come get the machine. They have even turned it over to collections!!! Pitney Bowes is absolutely ridiculous.

This is nothing new for PB. They have always been messed up. When I worked in my father's insurance office 30 years ago, PB put in a really nice machine as a trial, in hopes that he would upgrade from his current machine. A year later, they remembered that they had given him the loaner on trial. That time their incompetence worked in his favor.

I haven't had much luck with them. The first time I tried to put a machine in, it was used, and so incredibly slow that I could lick and apply a stamp faster.

The second time I tried them, they or the USPS had just moved to requiring that the machine be "refilled" online. That's fine, but you had to put money in their account ahead of time - no interest paid - and then they charged you an $8 fee for transferring the money from the account to your machine. This was for my small office, and I never moved more than $100 at a time. 8% penalty each time I wanted to refill the meter.

The last time I tried them, they had dropped the transfer fee, but somehow I was always late with my monthly payment, and incurred late charges. Somehow my one postage meter required three accounts, and three separate bills. I'm still not sure what for. However, when I got tired of paying late fees and cancelled the machine, I was told by the PB representative that all I needed to do was pay the bill a month in advance. Apparently this isn't true, even though I was charged a late fee on the last month that I had the machine, I still have a month's credit that I can't get PB to refund over two years later.

It is true that postage meters have to be inspected twice a year - this is a regulation imposed by the USPS on all postage meters, not just PB's. Also, the reason you can't just buy one is for the same reason, the USPS won't allow it - though I have always believed that this was a deal that PB worked out with the USPS to PB's advantage.

We upgraded our postage machine, which also meant we got a new lease. It is invoiced monthly. When the old machine was carted away, I realised I had already paid the monthly invoice AND they wanted "an advance" payment on the new machine. They couldn't apply the old lease payment to the new one - they needed a completely new check for the new equipment...but they would refund our old lease payment.

Not only did we not get our old lease refund in the next 4 months, we also continued to receive invoices for the old equipment. Every time we got a lease on equipment we didn't even possess anymore, I called about it, making notes of who I spoke to and what they told me: it takes "a couple months" for the lease cancelation to catch up with the billing system because invoicing is automatic - just disregard the old lease invoices.

Finally, we got a call from their collection department regarding our old leased equipment. The snippy supervisor chastised ME for not talking to the right people (I dialed the phone number from their invoices that said "questions about your lease?" AND had been transferred to the billing department), was told I couldn't just "ignore bills" and was threatened with having it reported to credit bureaus AND having the equipment on the lease in question repossessed. I told her to go ahead and send someone to come get the equipment that had been picked up by them 6 months ago when it was replaced with the new equipment. While I was on the phone with her, I was opening the company mail. One of the first envelopes I opened contained a refund check from PBCC for the old leased equipment.

I had an obnoxious woman from Pitney-Bowes walk into my store and start asking me about my postage meter. I explained that all decisions about it were made in the corporate home office.

Then she proceded to ask me "How much postage do you use?" When I replied, "I don't have any idea" in a chilling manner, she said, "You don't want to talk to me, do you?" I answered, "You're right" and walked off. It amazes me why a sales rep would waste anyone's time in such a situation, as I had no time for small talk about a transaction that didn't concern me.

We used a Pitney-Bowes postage machine in the '90s. After a year or so we decided to go back to regular postage stamps. I was told to figure out how to ship the machine back to Pitney-Bowes. I read the return information carefully and noted that it advised us to pay extra for a "proof of mailing" receipt.

Thankfully I followed their instructions to the letter, because they called *several* months later and claimed the machine was not returned and we owed them hundreds of dollars. I spent hours looking for that confirmation and triumphantly handed it over to my boss. He faxed it to PB and they never bothered us again.

I am still curious to know how many returned machines they claim are lost every year. At least they were kind enough to warn us ahead of time that a proof of mailing receipt might come in handy.

Would someone please tell me how to mail this thing back! They won't give me a mailing label for it until the lease I never agreed to is up!

IF ANY ONE GETS THE RETURN LABEL PLEASE POST IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!