Bank of America, in response to new costs associated with debit cards because of the Dodd- Frank financial legislation, put a five dollar a month charge on debit cards. Most other large banks followed suit.
When the brouhaha against the new charges reached a crescendo, the banks walked back their charge ( I love the political slang ‘walked back’).
This was a stupid act by Bank of America management in the first place. Had I been a member of management I would have explained three things. I would have explained the same things to the management of Netflix:
One: Never use business fees or penalties to react to political issues. Never. You will always antagonize somebody powerful, usually many somebodies.
Two: Always announce fee increases and their reasons well in advance. Most people will accept new fees if they are warned in sufficient time to think that they have time to change their behavior. I have tested this many times and one of the success of the modern credit card business was due to my discovery that you never send credit cards to people until you have warned them it is coming and they can phone to refuse it.
Three: If you wish to apply a new charge to an existing service, connect the charge to usage functions in order to make it more palatable. For the debit card, the optimal charge would have been $.25 for every usage under $10 and $.10 for every usage over $10. That would raise more money than the five dollars monthly charge.
In fact the banks will soon introduce the per use charge when the public is no longer paying attention and it is no longer a political issue.