I’m using the word “broken” as a programmer would.
I was reconciling my credit card bill yesterday (using Quicken after it downloaded my transactions), after our trip to Durango, and it reminded me how fundamentally broken the CC processing system is. Is was trying to figure out who “Fresh and Easy” was, since I couldn’t remember spending any money at a place called that (and there were two charges, a day apart). I Googled it, and came up with the grocery chain, but I was sure that we hadn’t been to one. Then I added “Durango” to the search terms, and a restaurant called “Sage Fresh Eats” came up, and indeed we had eaten there twice.
Then, my wife had a panic because she saw a charge from Ohio, with the card presented in person, on a day that we were in Colorado. She ended up disputing the charge and canceling the card, only to realize later that it was a valid charge from a vendor at a street fair.
Why can’t the CC companies provide a full description of the business? Name, address, phone- everything needed to ID it without any doubt.
I’m with ya, OP! And with moden phones, area codes are just numbers. I get phone calls at work from the next cube that have a Mississippi area code and city name. Who’s that? Oh that’s Chuck, he kept his phone number.
But now I feel bad for the street vendor, and there’s nothing that can be done!
Eh, I think this one is on the business, not the credit card company. The only way for the credit card company to know the business’s name is for the business to tell them, and apparently this business told them a different name than they put on the big sign out front. Whose fault is that?
When you call in to a customer service or help line, and first a robot asks you to input a bunch of personal info. Then, after waiting through incessant hold music, you finally get a human on the line, who asks you the same personal info questions a second time. What was the point of the first time?!?
If this didn’t happen so often, I might be inclined to let it go. But almost every time I check my list of charges, there is some company that is inscrutable. It should be a requirement that the full company information is available on the charge receipt. If I’m buying lunch from “Bobs house of Tilapia” It’s OK if they want to have the name on the card be “Fresh Fish,” but they should be required to link that to the business name.
In my experience, this isn’t uncommon, especially with charges made with smaller businesses. The name which shows up on the credit card statement is probably the name of the financial entity under which the business is incorporated (or has on their bank account), rather than the name of the actual retail establishment.
Because the vendor was from Ohio (or has their charge account set up through an entity in Ohio), and when the credit card issuer received the details of the transaction, they may not have any way to know exactly where the transaction actually occurred, or the name of the booth at the street fair – all they know is the account information from the vendor (which may not match the name on the booth, especially for a small/independent merchant), and where the vendor’s “home” is, financially speaking.
I feel dirty defending this but I can see it for fraud prevention. Ok, you know someone’s last 4 SSN and DOB, great. You can have all the info from the automated system. But, if you need more, asking you the information gives the person answering the call to judge quickly if they’re the actual account holder. Just like how bouncers will ask you for your DOB when handing them your ID. Can you rattle it off quickly or do you have to think about it?
Back in the 80s, my roommate was questioning a charge listed as being to “fulfillment services”. Now today, that’s pretty common, but back then neither of us had any idea. I guessed it was from an escort service, because they’d want to be discreet with a nondescript name, and hopefully they are fulfilling in their services.
I’m guessing that part of this is due to an outdated electronic reporting system that was developed in times when bandwidth and storage space were more expensive than they are now. It’s probably not helped by the vast number of entities involved in processing a charge. I’m not sure what exactly Stripe does and why they’re needed on top of Visa, the bank that issues the card, and the bank the money is going in to, but apparently they do something important that most small businesses don’t otherwise have access to. Presumably larger businesses can work directly with the actual processors, but those who can’t have to go through a middleman.
I definitely wish that there was more information on the bank or credit card statement than what I tend to get from many clients, especially if it was processed through Paypal. When that’s the case, it tends to always give Paypal’s phone number, which is useless for trying to figure out what it is. A lot of these middleman processors also insert their own letters and symbols into the memo, which also helps in obfuscating the source of a charge. And then you also have to deal with potentially other character sets; should the whole world use the roman alphabet for credit card transactions? Or should you accept that when you use it with a vendor in China that you’ll either get some gibberish code points for which your bank doesn’t know the associated symbols, or symbols that have no meaning to you?