A Cranky Consumer

Capital One Hired The Guy Who Says "No"

Capital One has dropped the ads showing David Spade teaching his protege to say "No".

In fact, it looks like they have put the guys who say no in charge of the bank.

I made a payment and was told that my payment would be processed expeditiously-- at 5PM the rep said.

In fact, the rep shouldn't have said that. What she said was that I will have the system generate a ticket so that the next morning at 8AM you will be credit with the funds you have paid us.

I was relying on the rep's word and went to get some gas later that night. Much to my surprised, it was a "NO!"

It took me half an hour on the phone while the Mobil guy patiently waited for Capital One to find the one guy they hadn't fired who could still say yes. All the people I talked to previously said that Capital One was saying "NO" to everyone.

Imagine that.

And every word of this is true. I'm pissed off. I have had an account for 25 years and it took me half an hour of "NO" before I got a "Yes".

Sheesh.

It took me half an hour to get a $30 credit line increase so that I could pay for my gas.

Are you throwing $50 a year out the window?

Saw Crosby Stills Nash & Young last night. Since there was quite a wait to get out of the parking lot, I decided to pick up cans to help a woman raise funds for cancer research. I picked up $7.00 in cans, which is actually 140 cans, for those of you who can't do the math.

Out of that group, about 80% were Budweiser (Flower) Cans, 10% were Coor's Silver Bullet and the rest were distributed among Pabst, Rolling Rock, and soda cans. I was surprised that I didn't see a single wine bottle in the lot. Maybe wine drinkers are more fastidious? 

At any rate, a lot of cans get tossed by Bud drinkers.  That is costing them serious money. If the average Bud drinker drinks a six-pack per night, and tosses them all out the window, that's about $1 a week that he or she could be saving. By the end of the year, the lucky Buds would have saved enough money to buy about 5 more cases of their favorite beer.

I propose that Budweiser sponsor the cleaning crew for America's roadways, since most of the trash along the road is Budweiser beer cans. Either that, or raise the deposit on cans to a dollar, so that somebody actually notices all those nickels that get thrown away. After the first 24 bucks to put down a deposit on a case of beer, you had better believe that those bottles would get returned.

And just imagine the reduction in ticket prices or taxes which would be possible if the road crews didn't have to go 

Do the math.

Availability of Funds

I've been depositing my check monthly with the Bank of America for the last two years. Every month, they used to take two or three days to give me full credit, whether I deposited the check at my ATM or directly with a teller at the branch. Three months ago, they started putting a hold on the deposit, not allowing me the funds until 11 days had passed. Naturally, some checks I had written, expecting them to clear in a week or so started to bounce.

When I protested online, they responded to my queries by pointing out that they had the right to do so by the agreements I had signed. I agreed but pointed out that they had not followed that practice over the previous two years and to suddenly do so, without notice, was very unfair. Their response was that I was out of luck.

I persisted and did research that showed that they had access to the cleared funds within a day.  ( I asked my company to look into this.) Once I showed them proof of this, they reluctantly reversed the $340 in overdraft charges which had accrued in my account. They said that they still had the right to hold the funds, but were reversing the charges as a "courtesy".

On Saturday of last week, I made another deposit directly with a teller and found out that I again would not have access until more than a week would have passed. I asked to see the manager and told her what had happened and she said that if I came back after three days, she would check my deposit to see whether or not it had cleared. After a half an hour on the phone three days later, the bank gave me credit for the funds.

I wonder what other banks policies are on clearing out of state checks. I think it is time to start looking for a new bank.

Roaming Hack

Link: Roaming Hack.

One man's advice for how to get out of a cell-phone contract. Make more than half of your calls from roaming areas. I'm not sure if it works but it sounds good to me. (I'm still pissed about all the charges that Cingular hit me with two years ago. I finally gave up the fight and paid the bill. I would have thought about trying this had I known about it.

Happy Ending: Dunkin Donuts Overcharges 13 Year Old Boy By 38% For Bagels

Holy Mackerel! I talked with the manager and she said that it was a mistake... someone who doesn't usually work in her store. She is sending me a coupon for some bagels.
_______________________________________________________________

Last night I stopped to buy a half dozen bagels for my kids and I for breakfast at a Dunkin Donuts in Bridgewater, Massachusetts-- the one at the Southbound Service Plaza off Route 24 just before the intersection with Route 495.

Bagel prices were $.69 each or $3.69 for a half dozen. I left my 13 year old son Thomas to buy the bagels while I went outside for a minute. He came out and told me he had been charged $5.10. He said that he had protested to the Dunkin Donuts employee but she said that she had to go by what was on the register.

I went back in and pointed out the large sign that said a half dozen bagels were $3.69. She said that she "had to go by what was on her register."

She would only give me her manager's name and said that there was nothing that she could do for me.

What killed me was my kids attitude afterwards-- you just have to do what they say. You can't do anything and besides, why get upset over $1.41?

Well that $1.41 times a thousand dozen bagels or a hundred thousand dozen bagels sold every day adds up fast.

I guess I could have gone back and asked for a refund and bought each of the bagels individually but I didn't think of that until I was back on the highway. Buying them that way would only have cost $4.14 but probably would have gotten me killed by the people behind me in line.

Still, the people behind me were nice. They agreed that what I said was true. The posted price says "$3.69 for a half dozen" and that should determine what gets charged-- not what is in the register.

I asked the lady, "What if the register said they were free?" She said that it wouldn't matter to her. She was just doing her job.

If you still don't follow the math:

Buy One for $.69 or buy a half dozen for $5.10 ($.85 per bagel). There was no cream cheese, heating, etc. involved.

Stern Will Jump To Sirius In 2006

Stern Will Jump To Sirius In 2006

An Example Of What's Wrong With Google

I searched for the "To Be Or Not To Be" speech from
Hamlet on Google and got what I think are hilarious
results including links to "Hot Or Not?" , the national do-not-call registry and the notmilk page. (See attached "To Be Or Not To Be Per Google" )

1 800 No Flowers. com

I would like to nominate the 1-800-Flowers.com site
for its particularly egregious offenses against good
design and just plain common sense and suggest that
they are a good candidate if you do a book survey of
well thought-out web campaigns that failed owing to
one or two seemingly minor glitches.

I received a message promoting a special lily offer
last Monday. When I went to order it, I was told that
they don't deliver perishables on Monday. (Why they
sent out their message on a Monday morning is beyond
me.)

I persisted and ordered the flowers for Tuesday. They
allowed me only 210 characters for the message to my
sweetie and did not include "Romance" as one of the
drop down reasons for sending flowers.

Last time I ordered from this company, I completed a Bizrate survey after placing my order
and I received the bizarre message titled "2367189"
(or something like that) in return several days later.
I was going to report it as spam but decided to open
it anyway to see what it could be about and low and
behold it was the response from the company. In it,
their customer service rep assured me I was wrong and
that "romance was a code 14."

I think that all this merits a special award. I have read and enjoyed several of Jakob Nielsen's books
including "Designing Web Usability" which was lovingly
referred to as "the bible" by our PHD cognitive design
consultant from the now-extinct Cambridge Technology
Partners in a web design session. (We spent 100's of
hours designing a site which ran like a turtle but
that's another story.)

By the way, the flowers were lovely, as I am told.

Weather Or Not

This morning I am supposed to be moving.

But Wednesday, I heard a report that a hurricane was coming north and would bring heavy rains and moderate winds to this area by this morning. Weather.com said that there was an 80% chance of rain this morning and their little hour by hour forecast showed rain, rain, rain.

So I canceled the scheduled move. I have a piano up on the third floor of an apartment building, so we need to get a crane to get it down. I could just see a mild breeze and some rain turning the piano into one end of a wrecking ball. (My Steinway upright piano weighs over 700 pounds.)

I just called up my mover to discuss it and he said that they go ahead, rain or shine. That in fact the only time they had ever canceled was the blizzard of '78. I asked him if he hadn't seen the news about the hurricanes coming up from Florida on the internet and he said that he didn't use the internet. And now that he knew I was nervous about the weather, he was going to demand cash up front to keep the job scheduled. (Lawton Movers out of Providence-- the man is not very customer friendly.) Because it was not his fault that it was going to rain. (As if it were my fault.)

Well, I didn't want to take the chance of having to cancel and lose $1000, so I didn't pay. and as of 4AM this morning, what's left of the storm is passing hundreds of miles to the west and it hasn't started raining here at all.

It was the right decision.

But I sure wish it would rain.

A Cingular Experience

 

Wow! Talk about fun.

Got a new phone last month from Cingular-- a Nokia 3595 with a nice screen, internet access, cool keys. In order to get it, I had to pay off a past due balance of $45 and I had a current balance of over $250. I wanted to negotiate that amount before I got the new phone so I called the 611 number and talked to some guy who said that he couldn't do anything for me and that his supervisor was out. I was in a hurry (I was trying to get back to my new house), realized that I had made a bunch of roaming calls (I was up in Maine for my Mom's 70th birthday) and even call Sweden to find out about getting a special present and so I just paid the balance and thought that it was a learning experience.

At any rate, knew that I had wracked up the bill and when my girlfriend told me that she had been using too many minutes on her phone (from her office) so when I heard a radio ad about the new $9.99 Family Plan add-on phone with free service on all calls to Cingular customers, I thought that it sounded great. I thought that now we can blab to our heart's content.

When I went into the Cingular store, I used the occasion to complain about some of the cell holes in our area. (There's one on Route 95 about a mile from my house. My calls drop every time I am driving through that area.) My salesman told me that everybody's servce was similarly bad (with holes) and that he was still using a Sprint phone (personally) because of a contract he couldn't get out of and that he had the same problem.

So while I was having the new phone set up, I knew that I had been using the new phone for internet services, etc. and I wanted to see how many minutes I had used, so that I could decide if I needed to up my minutes. Howqever, they couldn't tell me my balance at the Cingular Store or pay my bill at the office(talk about Customer Service!- the couple behind me, who had been waiting for ten minutes, just turned around and left (because they wanted to pay their bill). At any rate, I had just paid my $299.99 bill so I thought that I was still okay (with my minutes), but they asked me to call their business office (611).

After getting the phone, I started driving to meet my girlfriend for dinner and called the Business Office. After waiting for a while. I found out that my balance was $561.26! Stunning, isn't it?

One of the bad things about having a new girlfriend living across a state border is that you are subject to roaming charges any time you visit. Also, anytime you take her to new places like Baltimore or Maine. Also any time your mother just happens to have her 70th birthday.

Ouch!

So I talked with the customer service rep (Monique) and she was very nice, but only offered me $100 off my bill. I asked to speak to a supervisor. One of the supervisors called me back after about a half an hour and started asking me if I thought that I could use a service and not pay for it. I told him that I thought that they should have told me about these minutes when I was getting the new phone of August 7th and that having been a good customer for 6 years and having never done this before, I would like him to knock at least half off the bill. (Actually, I was hoping to knock it down to less than $100 because I had just paid them $299.99 only two weeks earlier.)

He told me that everyone knows that they don't have the technology to tell us what our bills are until the end of the month and that the Cingular rep had no obligation to tell me that I had already gone over my minutes for the month (by a lot) on August 7th. I told him that it was like the banking business and that we couldn't just go and up someone's rate from 5% to 25% when they were upping their usage, regardless of what it says in their contract. A number of banks had tried that in the past and the consumer protection laws and Attorney Generals had stepped in to protect consumers on multiple occasions.

Have to go back to work-- will continue later. I'm still hoping for a happy ending. I talked with a much more reasonable person today.