Remember when T-Mobile was pretty much unanimously praised on social media and places like Reddit for its affordable plans, exceptional promotions and sweet weekly freebies, solid customer support, and following its Sprint acquisition, industry-leading network expansion efforts?

While that was all not very long ago, a string of major security mishaps, a few uncharacteristic "Un-carrier" moves, and especially several price hikes of late have made it quite hard to find satisfied T-Mo subscribers online nowadays.

Technically, of course, Magenta never raised its monthly plan rates, adding instead all sorts of "device connection charges" and removing AutoPay discounts for credit card users to improve that already sweet bottom line.

At the same time, the wireless giant also continued to fire more and more employees and close the physical doors of more and more stores, which will probably happen again fairly soon. That's because the always resourceful and well-informed folks over at The Mobile Report have it on good authority that T-Mobile is cooking up yet another new fee destined to drive people away from its retail locations.

If for some reason you like to pay your bill in a brick and mortar store, the "Un-carrier" will apparently start charging you $5 (plus tax) for that "luxury" on July 19. The only obvious way to dodge this "in-store payment support charge" will be to, well, stop doing that and start paying your bill online instead.

While we imagine the vast majority of people reading this online article already do that, some of the reactions on Reddit strongly suggest there are still many T-Mobile customers who prefer to conduct their wireless business the old fashioned away. Or at least that many people would like to have the in-store payment option without being charged extra for it.

In a way, it makes perfect sense for Magenta to push towards a "digital-enabled future" and ramp up its efforts to reduce physical financial operations. But in another, it's pretty clear that the end goal here is to reduce expenses associated with retail stores and retail employees.

As far as customers are concerned, you should probably expect to be informed about this impending change the next time you visit a T-Mobile store to make a bill payment and get all the instructions and help you need to switch to an online system.