The stupidest thing I've ever heard

[SteveDallas]

Ummm... OK. Not the stupidest maybe. Anyway.

I love comic strips. I've written in my other posts of my great affection for Bloom County. But there are many others, and I have always opened any newspaper to the comics first.

But in the first place, sitting down with a hunk of dead tree every day has gotten to be more and more problematic in terms of time, in terms of what I'm looking for in news coverage, etc. etc. In the second place, there are some comics I like that aren't carried in any given paper.

So a couple years ago, www.mycomicspage.com came to my attention. This was pretty cool, I thought. I got to pick what strips I liked and put them in whatever order I wanted--there were even archives!! And for all this they wanted $10 a year or something like that (it's now $11.95).

More recently, www.comics.com came along. I was less enthused about this site due to their exceedingly clunky user interface, and because they still insist on selling ads on their pages. But they had some stuff I liked to read, so I ponied up my $11.95 for them too.

In general I've been happy... I liked the stuff I signed up for (and comics.com cleaned up some of their UI issues), and on both sites I discovered new strips I hadn't seen before that I liked a lot.

But I'm still missing some real favorites. In particular ones published by King Features. Well I coughed up for the other two.... why not KF's site, dailyink.com? They want $15/year--more than the other two, and they have fewer strips I'm interested in, so the economics aren't as attractive. But, oh wait, they have a $3/year "handling charge". Wait, so now it's EIGHTEEN bucks a year? I'm sorry. I will never give a penny to an outfit that could post this with a straight face.

Originally Posted by The dailyink.com web site

Q: What is the $3 handling charge?

A: The $3 handling charge covers the cost of the different services required, for example the online merchant which initially handles the credit card processing, and other services throughout the year like customer service support, bandwidth for access & e-mail delivery, and server hosting.

What's next? Will the grocery stote charge me an extra $5 to compensate for the people who had to put the food on the shelf?