A few years ago, I had a home equity loan with Chase bank. Diligence and patience persevered and the final payment was finally sent in the mail to the bank. The next month I received a statement from
chase bank in the amount of TWO CENTS! Yes, that’s correct .02 cents. The two cents was interest on the unpaid balance from the date of statement to the date of payment received!

In a state of disbelief, shock and anger, I got in my car and drove four blocks to the nearest branch. After waiting in line for at least four people ahead of me, I vaguely recall almost throwing the two pennies at the cashier and telling her – rather rudely, I’m ashamed – how ridiculous this was since it cost the company more than two cents to process and mail the statement, to make certain that the two cents were credited to my account that day in order to avoid another statement next month for perhaps one cent! and that they had lost a customer.

Needless to say, I will never deal with this mega-bank again. In retrospect, had the time and inclination been available to me at the time, a letter should have been written to the officers of the bank detailing the incident, the bank’s effort and time involved in billing someone for this amount, and the ire that was created by a good and long-standing customer. Do you think they might have listened and responded? Do you think I might have gotten my two cents back? I wonder.

More here… http://bit.ly/cTtEpt

Long story short, I got my money back but had to fight them for about 45 minutes. But with Comcast specifically I do not compromise over anything due to a previous dispute where I had cancelled service and they charged my credit card for an additional month 2 weeks after I closed out the account. Both in person and on the phone I was told there was nothing they could do but in 6-8 weeks it should resolve itself with an account credit (on a closed account, helpful huh?). Seeing as I had no real options left, I disputed the charge with my credit card company, real easy process, and had the credit shown on my card within 24hrs.

And only now that I’ve written all this out do I realize how much scorn I have for Comcast. If any other cable company comes to my area, I promise you can have my business no questions asked.

In the case of healthcare, there are so many mistakes that I don’t trust that a bill is right ever. I just had an incorrect bill that took me maybe 3 minutes to solve…this guy on the phone had the authority to take off what he called a “mistake.” Glad I didn’t pay that bill, glad I know my co-pays and coverage, and glad I took the time to call. Saved $43!

Admittedly, in my case I really *had* left the country, but I’m sure you can use that excuse even if you don’t plan on emmigrating

It used to be that if the tube barriers mis-charged you on your Oyster card (the pre-payment card used for London public transport), you could go to the ticket office and get it refunded. *Now*, Transport For London, who run the busses and tubes, have said we can’t do that, we have to call their number – which isn’t toll-free. It’s not just not toll-free, it’s an 0845 number which, contrary to popular belief, is not charged at local rates, but it actually makes money for the company! So, when we get overcharged, it’s usually by a small amount – a couple of ££s at most – and they’ve set up the system so you either leave it and lose the money, or you call them, and pay them for the privilege of correcting a mistake *they* made!

You can email them instead, but as we all know, emails to companies often disappear into the ether never to receive a response…

You seem to assume that the local workers at a chain grocery want to keep making the mistakes pushed on them by corporate. They would be more upset if, as you suggest people should do, people stopped shopping at the grocery store entirely because there were too many mistakes.

You can read all the comments about customer service and empathize how hard it is but until you are at a desk you will never understand.

There is tremendous stress when you have to talk, type notes, use 5 different tools at the same time, fix the issue, keep the call short, AND hit your quality points so you don’t get your ass fired.

Once you do this 8 hours a day, day in and day out, you will understand how the current customer service model is completely broken. Crappy service will be the norm. Get used to it. Get used to letting it go.

My experience working in retail was so hellish that to this day if I’m given the wrong food in a restaurant I’ll say nothing, eat whatever was given to me, and still leave a %20 tip. Why do I do that? Because the server has a hard job and he/she is not getting rich doing it. I know that they have to wait on countless rude and maybe not fully evolved people. I just cannot participate in that.

The mortgage mistake was them applying some of an 8K October prepayment to the month of November rather than all of it to prepayment (not all of it, which is what made it weird). They were not going to send me a bill for November. If I hadn’t caught that it would have cost a lot more than $2.62. The $2.62 is what it would have cost me if instead of getting it applied correctly for October, I made the prepayment with November’s check… and assuming they’d done it correctly for that month. DH was polite on the phone and they fixed it up. Applying prepayments to future bills rather than to the principal is a very common way that loan companies take money, but Wells Fargo allows you to choose where the extra money goes. This time with a large pre-payment instead of our usual smaller prepayment they ignored what we told them to do, and in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Many grocery stores make lots of mistakes if you pay attention. It’s not just my paranoia either– this was in the news a while back, and the study found that on average the mistakes were in the grocery store favor. One complains to the customer courtesy desk, not the teller, and the person receiving the complaint isn’t the person who made the mistake (either the stock person or the computer person, though it’s usually the computer system, so at the corporate level).

At one point it was popular for grocery stores to give you a free item if they got the price wrong. We cleaned up on that.

But the actual answer to your question is because I was a kid and there was one grocery store near our house. These days I make enough money that I don’t pay attention to 10 cents here or there. The last time I complained about a wrong price was a couple of years ago at Target when I bought a brand of toilet paper I normally don’t buy because of an advertised sale… usually I’m price insensitive to the things I buy.

And yes, people do point out mistakes that I make and I thank them for it because I want things done correctly. I also tend not to make mistakes that steal other people’s money from them in a systematic way. Do you like keeping your mistakes as mistakes?

Chase and all of their points flew my wife and I in first class (flat beds) to Bali this year. Chase and all of their points put me up in a suite at the Bali Hyatt for six nights in October.

I like Chase — and all of their points.

When I was ready to buy car #2 (Mazda 626, brand new, right off the lot) I had the money in the bank. Yes, a total cash transaction, ready to write the check, no loan, and was completely stiffed at the dealership. All the guys hung outside yakking and smoking. No one inside volunteered to assist me except the receptionist, and I left.

Went back to my hometown, where I had bought car #1, and later, car #3. And, any future cars as well, I hope. Treat me right, and I’ll come back.

I can’t think of a single problem I’ve ever had with customer service anywhere, because when I do have a problem, I’m super-friendly to the representative. I politely ask for things, I do not demand. And guess what? I get what I want. I can’t ever remember a time when a fee wasn’t waived, or an account wasn’t closed at my request. I show gratitude to the representative.

Being nice gets you a lot further than being demanding.

As for you potential mortgage loss of $2.62, I’m guessing Illuminati…

Also, I seldom have problems of this kind. A few years ago we had problems with our internet provider. We eventually changed, but I did not file a complaint or anything like that. We just moved on. A person who berates a store clerk (who seldom has anything to do with the problem) is, in my opinion, a bully and barely even human. My 2 cents.

Well, I haven’t complained to Wells Fargo about how they round their pennies with my mortgage (I just occasionally adjust my spreadsheet… so far I’ve lost about 7 cents from that)… but I did get pretty pissed off at them about a $10 for no reason (“computer mistake”) charge they made the other month and got that taken off. They also screwed up the mortgage prepayment the month before in a really bizarre fashion (potential loss from that: $2.62, assuming they got the prepayment right the next month and I didn’t skip a payment just because they didn’t send me a bill). Funny how the computer problems are always in their favor.

The grocery store I tend not to pay much attention to anymore, but I used to point out mistakes all the time.