Our cell phone company has just started adding a $2 charge for any customer that still receives a mailed bill. They’re promising to donate an additional $2 to a charity for any customer that goes paperless, too.

I expected this sort of thing to happen years ago. Companies have been touting paperless billing for more than a decade, because it saves them a ton of cash. How do I know? Simple — they aren’t trying to charge you extra for it, and you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they would if it was even the same cost to them as paper billing (“for the convenience,” no doubt). They’ll never admit to you that it saves them money though, because then you’d want them to pass the savings along, and they’d far rather keep it themselves.

I prefer having something to put in my filing cabinet, so I can go back and research things. Most companies won’t hold your billing information forever. This one preserves the last eighteen months; some go back only six, or in one extreme case that I saw, only three. The paper bill also acts as a reminder, so I don’t have to remember to check for each bill myself each month.

Will I go paperless? Probably, eventually. I think I’ll wait until they iron out any bugs in the system though — and it’s a safe bet that there will be some, once people start moving over to it en masse, as they will now that it’s costing them money. Maybe another six months or so. We’ll see.