answer:I think that Verizon announced the $2 fee the week of ********* because they thought that no one was paying any attention and that it would be overlooked in the holiday activities. My guess is that some manager somewhere thought that this cockamamie scheme would bring in so-and-so-many millions of dollars every year with zero effort and blowback. Boy, was that manager wrong. Bad calculation. They must have been brain-dead in that planning office not not have noticed the hugely bad publicity that Bank of America got for their little shenanigan last fall. What idiots at Verizon allowed this kind of thing to go forward. I don’t think anyone at Verizon is smart enough to have come up with the scheme of looking bad for a day to look good for recanting. (But then, I liked New Coke, too) My assessment – the act of charging the $2 (and announcing it before *********) took them down 20 points in my esteem. The act of recanting gives them back two points. Bottom line – they still went way down in my estimation. Do corporations think we are all blind, deaf, dumb, and idiots?