Handling my irritation

Dear Mum,

On several occasions of late, when making an online purchase, I have come across this novel idea of a ‘handling fee.’  

Yesterday, for example, it was Pippa’s 22^nd birthday and so I ordered some flowers to be sent to her university digs.

(I think, in actual fact, it was Lucinda, my middle-class alter-ego, who chose this as a gift. It does seem peculiar to send flowers to a home in which its residents are barely looking after themselves, with the quantities of alcohol they consume and lack of sleep they get, let alone the capability to look after another living thing. Sadly, the plant that you nurtured the summer before I started university perished at the close of my Fresher’s Week as I instead pursued my new-found independence. I fear Pippa’s lilies might meet a similar fate. But I digress...).

I selected the bouquet, wrote the accompanying message and entered the delivery details.

Upon selecting my credit card brand I was confused by the £1 “handling fee.”

This could not have been correct; the card was in my hand, after all. Surely they had made a mistake?

Yet the order could not be completed without paying this handling fee. What, precisely, did the people receiving my order have to handle?

After all, it was me alone who turned on my computer, typed in the website’s URL and chose which product I wanted to buy with my credit card. How were the credit card company involved in either the decision making or physical process?

‘Handling fee’ simply does not make sense. I would prefer such a charge to instead be named the “any excuse to get more money out of you fee” or the “you’re a chump charge”.

And while I’m on the topic of commercial lingo I’d like to point out that it is not necessary for breakfast cereal brands to include the phrase “serving suggestion” on the face of their packaging, next to the image of a bowl of their product.

After decades of stabbing at a bag of breakfast cereal with a fork, society has finally grasped an easier and less frustrating way for cereal to be enjoyed. An image of the preferred bowl and milk carton is adequate, but please ditch the patronising ‘suggestion.’

As for a certain pizza delivery company, they need to rethink the wording of the voucher card they post through my door every other day. By all means, “Save up to £250” is just fine, but the subsequent “depending on usage” is an excessive use of language that states the bleeding obvious.

If only this candour would instead be adopted by those insisting upon a handling fee...