I have a Schwab account that was closed out years ago. Because of the imperfections of the process of closing accounts it has a balance of eighteen cents.

If I call I will face 20 minutes of voice mail. I stubbornly refuse to spend 44 cents to get 18 cents. There is no e-mail address easy to find on the statement. They spend 35.7 cents to mail me a statement with an 18 cent balance. Times 24 months that is $8.57.

I would love to save them the money, if only they would make it a little easier.

It seems that the more I read about customer service the worse it is.

We have progressed from getting accustomed to pumping our own gas, to being our own checkout clerk at the grocery store, to accepting 20 minute waits on the phone to getting issues resolved that used to only take 5 minutes for an average human to do.

We wait in lines to sit in crowded and uncomfortable seats on an airplane after we booked a flight online instead of using a courteous travel agent.

Customer service has gotten so bad that I prefer to buy online whatever I can, but I detest ever having to solve any billing issue. After I select my preference to be English I need to listen to an endless array of choices. I now ignore them all and keep pressing “0″ until I get a human.

While such customer service deterioration has been rationalized in the name of cost cutting, the cost to the companies has been the deterioration of customer loyalty.  Because we as consumers are being treated as a commodity, we now treat you as a commodity.

One credit card company corrected 10 fraudulent charges using over 70 adjustments on 5 consecutive statements. The only reason I haven’t called and bitched is because they have credited over $300 more than they should have.

I have spent 90 minutes ( I always keep a timer by my phone) and spoken with eight different customer reps with another card company getting them to stop charging me $9.95 a month for a service I did not want nor ask for and credit me for the last four months of these charges.

I am ready to shred all of my credit cards and use cash only just to avoid dealing with these fools.