Fido introduced a new charge of 25$ when an existing customer purchases a new phone with them since December 2010. This is effectively a fee to pay for paying them for business.

The new fee is justified as to cover 'significant costs in terms of processing, administration, inventory management fulfillment and stocking, every time a phone is ordered'. This fee also does not appear anywhere along the marketing, online shopping, purchasing and transaction processes up until the time you need to sign the agreements as you pick up the phone at the store. At that time, you've already browsed through the possible carriers, decided on a service you wanted, paid a reservation fee, waiting weeks for the phone to arrive and gone to the store already. It does not even appear in the large page of fine prints at https://www.fido.ca/web/content/terms/fido_terms_and_conditions.

Fido has an existing concept of FidoDollars where you can earn reward dollars for spending money with Fido to pay for a new phone later and this 'hardware upgrade fee' is just a way of being able to do marketing with FidoDollars without having to pay for it. A concept of a 'processing fee' can be applied to just about any business transaction that was ever done by man up from charging an extra pound of nuts in exchange for the opportunity cost of not hunting while trading down to charging 2000$ handling fee for a free 52" TV.

Simply put, it's just dishonorable business and false advertising. Since it's difficult to imagine how costs in terms of processing, administration, inventory management fulfillment and stocking can be avoided in any products sold by Fido, an honest approach would have just been for them to just post the displayed price of all products up 25$. Since after all, it's the whole point of having a price to a product: to cover for all costs in making it available for the buyer.

Fido has been marketing itself as the different carrier that cares. Please demonstrate this by removing this unjustified fee.

Image source: Fido