Green Can Be Profitable

Today, I received an email from Comcast detailing their new EcoBill program. How noble of Comcast, right? They care about the environment so much that they created a new program just to save it. In their words, EcoBill is “an environment friendly way to view and pay your bill online that takes less time and uses less paper.” Below is a screenshot of part of the email.

I agree that paperless billing is better for the environment. That is obvious. Less paper, less dead trees, better environment. Get it, got it, good. The thing that annoys me is I know that “EcoBill” is not Comcast’s attempt at saving the environment but rather a way of saving expenses. That’s right, every paper bill that Comcast sends out costs them money. Duh, right? It costs them for the envelope, the paper, the printing and the postage. Probably costs them in other ways too but those are what I could name off the top of my head.

How do I know that this isn’t an attempt to save the whales? I’ve been using Comcast’s online billing stuff for like a year and they’ve had recurring online payments the whole time. Yep, all they did is wrap their pre-existing online recurring payments with some green images that say “Eco.”

Nevertheless, I decided to go paperless and clicked the link. I was taken to a page where I logged in. Next stop, paperless bills, right? Wrong. Next stop was a page asking me to sign up for recurring billing. Sorry, I don’t want recurring billing, I just want paperless billing. I don’t like the idea of you taking my money automatically each month. If you really cared about the environment, I would be able to get paperless billing without giving you the keys to my bank account.

Oh, and another thing. If you really want to be “Eco” friendly, why don’t you stop sending me multiple paper advertisements for your triple play each week, when I’m already using two of those services? That would save a lot of paper. I guess maybe the “EcoBill” program is an attempt to make up for all of your advertisement spamming iniquities.