When it comes to looking at the receipt to make sure I wasn't overcharged, I'm not the most rigorous Sherlock Holmes-ian consumer. But I do tend to give it a recipt a glance, run the numbers in my head to see if they make sense, make sure I'm not paying for anything I didn't get. The most recent thing I caught was being charged for two dozen egs when I bought one. (And, yes, I'm scrupulous enough to report if I'm not charged for something. I may not notice a grocery store mistake, but I'm likely to spot one in a restaurant, and I never want the server to get into trouble. )
But sometimes shit happens, and shit happened to Letitia Bishop of Columbus, Ohio.
In early January, she bought some Subway store subs for her family at a Thornton Oil gas station. One of the subs was rung up as $1,010, bringing her bill to $1.021.50, which was charged to her debit card. I'm pretty sure the Five Dollar Foot Long is no longer a thing. And I know that there's been plenty of food inflation, fast and other. But $1,010 for one of their subs?
Oh, baby.
This overcharge would have through anyone for a loop, but for the cash-strapped Bishop, the episode turned into a horror show that
...left her feeling "stressed, overwhelmed." At one point, she couldn't even afford groceries because her "account was negative," she added. (Source: Yahoo)
Bishop went back to the store and tried to straighten things out, but they just told her that she needed to work it out with Subway corporate. Which turned out not to be all that helpful, as Bishop found when she tried to get through to corporate.
She then returned to the Subway store, "only to find it had closed" for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, Bishop contacted her bank, where the answer was "tough luck."
Turns out that using a debit card, rather than a credit card, was a bad idea. Canceling a credit card transaction is quicker and easier than reversing a debit card payment.
Here's this poor woman, trying to do the right thing financial by using her debit card, rather than rolling up credit card charges, and Bang! Zoom!
Fortunately, Thornton, the gas station chain where the Subway store was located, stepped in and came through with a $1,000 for Bishop.
I don't blame the Subway store folks for the way they tried to handle the situation. Someone working in a gas station Subway is not all that far up the corporate ladder to know what to do here. It migh have been a high school kid. It might have been an older worker without a super skill set. Sure, they could have tried to provide Letitia Bishop with a number at Subway that a helpful human would have answered. But I'm sure that the Subway workers didn't exactly have that info at their fingertips.
But shame on Subway for having a convoluted phone system that gatekeeps anyone with a complaint from getting through to a helpful human. Not that this makes Subway any difference from most organizations out there. How many times have I screamed "Human! Human! Human!" into a voice system? Amazingly, not one of those calls has been to Subway HQ.
And shame on the bank for not being more helpful to Letitia Bishop, who was clearly stressed out and broke through no fault of her own.
But kudos to Thornton Oil for stepping up.
Oh, they're no aw shucks Midwest regional gas station chain. That may have been their profile in the past, but now they're owned by the deep profits of BP. Still, they took care of a problem that was a couple of degrees separation from being theirs. Good for them.
Why is it so damned hard for people who get screwed by some stupid little mistake to get unscrewed?
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