A thought for Verizon Wireless

Dear Verizon,

You've had a very bad year-end. Your state-of-the-art 4G network has had four outages this year with three of them being in December.

You've taken a beating from the press, customers, and even the FCC over a plan to charge $2 convenience fee for every online transaction. It was so bad, in fact, that you scrapped the plan less than a day after announcing it.

People now say the word "Verizon" the same way they say the word "Netflix," with a small chuckle combined with an eye-roll.

Now, I understand why you want to move folks off of one-time, online bill payment transactions and on to automatic, repeating payments; it costs more to process the one-time payments versus the automatic payments.

But, instead of punishing those who choose the one-time payment, how about incenting them instead? AT&T offers a $10 gift card for customers who sign-up for autopay. Dish Network waives certain upgrade or service fees for customers on autopay and paperless billing.

May I humbly suggest that you give away something that you charge $2 per month for now, like roadside assistance or cell phone insurance? Certainly, it doesn't cost you $2 to provide those services, so it's not like you'd be losing a lot of money. One would think you'd make it up on the processing fees.

It's bad enough you've taken away the "new every two" promotion, shrunk the return window from a month to two weeks, and changed your upgrade policy from 13 months to 20 month on a two-year contract, so how about a "give back?"

Just a suggestion from a guy who won't upgrade his smartphone because he doesn't want to lose his unlimited data plan.