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Monday, August 23, 2010

Pay Yesterday or Pay the Penalty Today

I pay all of my bills online, and when I say I pay all of my bills online I mean my wife pays all of our bills online. My wife was born and raised in Korea so it takes a lot to get her upset. When she comes to me with a problem I can rest assured it is a real problem and not some silly "squash this bug," or "how do you change the batteries on the remote" type of problem.

It seems that Macy's has decided to change the processing time for payments made online from a seemingly archaic 1 day to an utterly Jurassic 5 days. Now this sounds ridiculous but it will make sense in a minute - stay with me. The genius of this plan is that they notified their customer base via email on 8/10/2010. A quick glance at the calendar shows that to be a Tuesday, what company makes a major announcement like that on a Tuesday? Even if you made your payment online the very day you got the notice it would be late if it was due on the 13th.

Now due to the extremely important nature of the information contained in all emails from Macy's I'm sure all of you drop everything when one arrives, but my wife decided to let this one sit for a few days. Not knowing that the processing time had been changed and it was not physically possible for the payment to arrive on time unless she went in person to make a store payment it was made online.

Fast forward a week to me on the phone with Helen, the very polite customer service agent on the other end of the line. Macy's has seen the fault in their logic but needs some sort of proof. Here is the amazing part, the solution is for me to fax them a copy of the notification email. I'm sure your thinking, "why do they want you to fax them an email?" and I asked that very same question. The response was laughable; it seems that Helen's supervisor, "Shmarr" in customer service cannot receive emails from customers. You read that right - the customer service supervisor at Macy's cannot receive emails from customers.

Now in order to have them remove the $29 charge I am forced to print out this email, drive to Macy's and have them fax it in (that's right tree huggers, this electronic mail was printed AND faxed).

Updated:

I'm not the only one who thinks Macy's sucks!

Macys' also sucks on Facebook.

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