So I had to mail a check to a pre-paid gift-card company, and I included this letter.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Card Services
Fiserv
455 South Gulph Road, Suite 405
King of Prussia, PA 19406
2 January 2014
Dear Card Services-
In response to the recent bill for $14.90 I received from
you regarding my pre-paid gift-card, I wanted to reach out.
When I received your bill, I polled the people I know. While the overwhelming suggestion as to how to
respond was to simply ignore the bill, some of the suggestions were pretty
creative—my favorite being to send you a check for $20.00, and include an
invoice to you for $5.10.
The sheer ridiculousness of that suggestion sheds light
on the sheer ridiculousness of the bill I received from you.
I test drove a car in October, and was told that for my
time, I would be sent a pre-paid $50 gift-card.
When I received the card, I took the necessary steps to activate it, and
used it for an initial purchase of around $25.
Then I took it to a local bookstore, accrued a $40 tab, handed the clerk
my card and let her know to run the card for $25—the remaining balance on the card. She attempted to, but said that the card was
processed for the full $40. We were both
confused, and I told her that I must have been mistaken about the amount
initially on the gift-card. Early Merry
Christmas to me—my $50 card must have been for $75!
Just kidding. The
following week, I received the attached letter, letting me know that I owed
your organization for the excess charge, and a reminder that it was most
definitely for sure my fault that I owed it—the “Cardholder Agreement” was
referenced several times.
I’m paying my tab—I would forever regret by stubbornness
if this ended up on my credit report and ruined my shot at qualifying for the
best iPhone 6 deal ever in the future—but I felt that I owed it to you, to the
bookstore clerk, to myself, and to society to let you know this:
Sending people gift-cards for $50, but allowing them to
spend more than $50 on it is a really, really bad call.
Here’s why:
1—It makes you all
look really shady.
I’m not saying you ARE really shady, but yeah, it doesn’t
look great for any legitimate business to operate by tricking their customers. You may as well update your “Cardholder
Agreement” to say “Congrats—you have $50 from us, OR more than that, depending
on if the store where you run your card is able to split payments on more than
one card, or if they have a system that runs the card for the amount left on
the card. In that case, liiiike…in the
case that you shop at Barnes and Noble, you have an unknown amount of money
from us…you’ll just have to wing it, then mail us a check at some point. Probably.
But might be completely on the honor system…you’ll never know for sure
if we would have taken this to a debt collector. Merry Christmas!!!”
2—No one else does
this.
I like to consider myself a gift-card connoisseur. I change my favorites every ten minutes, which
means that no one is ever sure what to get me, so they get me gift-cards. I’ve had all the pre-paids—Visa, MasterCard,
mystery bank XX, the department store cards, the restaurant cards, the fast
food cards, the boutique cards, the individually written cards from shops that
give out gift-cards so rarely that they don’t have them mass-produced…and
literally zero of them have ever, ever, ever allowed me to “overdraft” my card
total. Do they decline if the clerk
tries to run them for more than is left on them? Sure.
Do they run for only the balance of the card? All the time.
Because that means that I only spend what’s actually on the card. Smart.
Imitation-worthy.
3—This just seems
like a REALLY bad business call.
What if I’d been car shopping instead of book shopping?! Your only recourse would have been to sit
down, write me a letter saying “Listen, you better send us a check, because YOU
OWE US THAT MUCH AT LEAST SHANNON,” and were I not an honest (or
credit-monitoring) person, I would have been like “Nope,” recycled that thing
and driven off to Mexico in my new (free) VW. Be
honest…could I overdrafted my gift-card for $20,000?! If yes, please let me know, because at that
point, I’m no longer worried about my credit score.
4—Isn’t this also
a waste of time and money for you??
I think we can all agree that it’s a waste of time for me—and
a check, and a stamp, etc. But it seems
like you guys would have to be getting tired of sending these notices out. And I cannot imagine that most people receive
this and think “Oh, sure, let me go ahead and just send this gift-card company
my money for their mistake,” right? So
you are either wasting MORE time and money on the follow-up, or wasting time
and money on NOT following up, and having people completely blow you off (like
I will always wonder if I should have), leaving you with an unpaid bill for
however long, because there’s no due date.
Long story short, my check is attached, so hopefully my
credit score will remain untarnished, and I imagine that the feedback of one
girl with a pretty small gift-card isn’t even a blip on your radar. However, it’s my New Year’s wish for you all
that this policy is changed to save what I’m sure are countless others from the
wasted time, check and stamp as a result of this extremely annoying policy, so
I felt like I had to say it.
Best,
Shannon
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