The son of a friend of mine is getting married. The wedding is in California, where the bride and groom live. They have gift site at Macy’s and so we decided to have a gift sent from there. The gift cost $50, including shipping. When my wife tried to pay with a Canadian credit card, they told her they had a $7 service charge for dealing with a Canadian credit card. WTF? It costs them 0 to deal with a Canadian credit card. Most merchants don’t even notice and none has ever said a word. Seven bucks won’t break me but this is pure gouging. Macy’s: never again.
And that’s on top of the transaction fee, if your card has it. I think it costs them less to take Visa than Vis-eh… but I am assuming it’s a common US brand. Could you just ship the same product from another website, or is it a Macy’s-only brand? Although it sounds like you just bit the bullet and it’s a done deal.
I tried to book a train overseas, but apparently they don’t take US cards. I didn’t find this out because they told me, oh no, it gave me a generic “can’t complete transaction” error. I had to find out by googling. I bought something I didn’t need off Amazon just to make sure that it wasn’t cancelled or something. This was a Visa that worked fine everywhere else.
BTW, it’s spelled macy*s… 
It’s all about the sales. If your SIL doesn;t work for Macy’s, your’e not playiing the game right.
If you need to make sure your card isn’t canceled again, would you buy one of these, you know just to make sure your card is working. I’ll PM you my address.
At least Macys gave you the option to pay an international service charge. Not long ago, I needed to order something from a Canadian company, and my bank blocked the transaction completely.
That really sucks! Considering they have a big fancy website and a huge wedding registry business, I’m sure they have tons of foreigners with their foreign credit cards buying items off their site all the time. Guess they finally decided to make more money off it.
My biggest problem was always my postal code. So many places would say they shipped to Canada, but then their online forms wouldn’t let me put in my address.
I got frustrated with mail ordering from them in the US. One item I ordered was a messenger bag for my work bag; my old one was literally falling apart so I needed a replacement soon. I ordered it and a few other things (2 pairs of shoes, pair of boots, shirt) a couple weeks before Christmas, and everything but the boots arrived before Christmas. I was notified by e-mail that the bag was on backorder and wouldn’t ship until December 27th, and would that be OK? I said sure.
That was the last time I got any communication from them unprompted. Ship dates came and went, I e-mailed, would get back a “shipping soon, so sorry” message with a date about a few days later, rinse and repeat. Finally it was coming up on two months after and I e-mailed and said I sympathized if their supplier was jerking them around, and to just tell me if they really weren’t sure. I got the usual answer, lots of apologies and another shipping estimate. I told them to cancel my order. Got a “so sorry, we’ve refunded your card” response, which really infuriated me, as I’d paid with a gift card, so either they hadn’t refunded it, or they put the money back on something which I’d thrown out after using. I explained this to them and basically told them the process of shopping with them was so frustrating, I didn’t care about the refund at this point if it meant I didn’t have to deal with their ineffectual attempts at customer service any longer.
Yeah, Macys does suck. In my opinion all the big department stores do (I mean, seriously, it’s a business model whose time is over) but at least Sears and J C Penney suck for lower prices.
If I’d been the kind of sadistic bride who had a registry and put shit on it, I’d have had one at Macy’s and had people buy me bone china and fancy sheets. But I’m not.
Man, I was hoping for a Marshall Fields thread 
Or a Hudson’s thread.
On the plus side, they have decent stuff, and the woman who works in Men’s Suits in the store near me is the last real store salesperson (as opposed to cash register runner) left.
On the down side, their damn discount coupons are nearly worthless, having exclusions that are longer than War and Peace, and which mean you can’t get discounts for anything but store brands and a few orphans. Another store had an advertising campaign which was basically “our discount cards actually give you a discount.”
I think I still go because I have fond memories of the magic store in Herald Square, a full continent away now.
Well, if you can normally get the conversion without the fee in US transactions, why not wire the money to someone in the U.S. and then have them buy it for you, with your shipping address?
Yeah, I know it’s more work, but, honestly, when someone does something like this to me, I like to do what I can to get around it.
Yeah, I swear those coupons are mostly composed of fine print exclusions that boil down to “nothing in any famous or popular brand, and probably nothing in a department you care about.”
Don’t know about Canada, but in US, wire transfers are damn expensive. E.g. BofA’s $25 fee for domestic, $35-45 for International depending on currency. That said, there may be cheaper ways to send money.
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That said, there may be cheaper ways to send money.
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For that US to Canada charge I mentioned earlier that was denied, the workaround was PayPal.
For an international transfer, their fees to receive funds range from 0.5 to 3.9% depending on the countries involved and if the funds are coming from a PayPal account, checking account or credit card.
Unless someone tells me differently, I will continue to believe that all the international transaction charges are paid by the 3.5% exchange fee my bank charges me. As I said, no merchant ever seems to have noticed that my MC or Visa was on a Canadian bank until this.
Just confirmed this with my SIL, who keeps a part time job at Macy’s just to take advantage of the sales and discounts. She says the coupons are worthless.