But, isn’t this exactly what the original cashier did wrong: a failure to be negative and say “I can’t do that”?
That was my first thought, but I think the problem was that debit transfers go through right away, so she wouldn’t have time to get his money in her account before it registered that she has NSF.
I agree with others that when you are down that low, the best thing to do is use cash. Debit cards are a great alternative to credit cards if you want the convenience of the card, but I found it hard to manage a checking account that way sometimes, espeically when there are times when you don’t have much in it.
Am I missing something? They charged you the correct amount. The issue appears to be an allocation between you and your fiance. According to you, you don’t care about the time of resolution, because you have the funds to cover this another account, but you need to “HAVE THIS REFUNDED.” They don’t owe you a refund, your fiance owes you $80. This entire debacle could have been cured by him writing you an $80 check and depositing it into your account.
But she said she has enough in savings to cover the overage, just that she has to then “reimburse” savings. That could be done by depositing fiance’s cash asap in the morning.
The way to do this in future is that fiance pays the bill and OP reimburses fiance. That keeps the store from having to split the charges, it keeps the line moving, and it reduces the possibility of this sort of incident.
You are right…I missed that in the OP. So, no, if she can transfer the money from her savings, and then get her fiance to write her a check to deposit in her savings account, I am not understanding the issue at all.
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How was the transaction approved if you dont have the money in the bank? If you dont have enough money, the transaction will not go through. Possibly it would if you run it as Credit, but certainly not if you run it as Debit.
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If you do have the money in the bank, how will there be over draft fees? Are you kiting checks?
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If you are kiting checks, then why couldn’t you just let your fiance’ pay you his portion right away? OR, why not just write a check at the store instead of using multiple cards.
The only answer I can think of for 3 would be that your fiance’ was using credit and didn’t have any cash in his account at all. In that case:
- Why not charge the entire thing on his credit card and you can help him pay that bill with your 40 bucks at the end of the month.
There seems to be just a billion ways to fix this problem way before you ever have to get teenagers involved.
What he said… And If the debit split is THAT important to you, the onus is on you to make sure you’re authorizing the right amount. Especially when you take into account the age of the person at the register.
This is incorrect. Banks will happily let you overdraw your account on a Debit card, and sometimes even at an ATM. They will then sock you for so many fucking fees you’ll be in the poorhouse for a month, because this is how they make a shitload of money.
The old days of the bank “denying” transactions are waning. The new paradigm in banking is “fee based income” and they are getting more and more crafty with the fees.
crazyjoe speaks the truth.
Well, he speaks the exaggeration.
Trust me when I say that the entire OP was an after the fact anger reaction. At the time I was, much like Liberal described, having an entirely internal panic. I was not happy, but I wasn’t angry or ranting and raving. My demeanor was more anxious than anything, nothing that would justify rudeness on the part of the manager. It was only after I got home, spoke with my bank, transferred some funds around and let the panic recede that I got angry.
And yeah, there’s a lot of other ways I could have handled the befores and afters, but at the time I could think of only one option, to have the store put the difference back on the card and continue the transaction as planned. Sure, it wasn’t the most efficient in retrospect but I wasn’t really analyzing things well.
And the late fee thing is exactly how much I was charged the last time an overdraft occured. It didn’t occur as multiple charges(though there were multiple overdrafts as a cause), but a single “over draft fee $150” on my statement. I don’t know what Citizen’s policies are but that is exactly what they charged me. Likely that single fee was a consolidation of the smaller fees charged for about 4 total overdrawn amounts (each around 5-10 bucks), so all I could think of at the time of this transaction was having things compound like that again and seeing another massive fee.
Just wondering, the manager asking “Well, can you tell me who hit the green ‘okay’ button?” might be because they have cases where the cashier hits the key. I see it quite often when someone seems confused by the system the cashier will reach over and press the OK key for the customer. This may have been a very important liability question the manager had to ask.
How come the cashier looked like she were going to wet her pants, if you hadn’t given her grief. Did the senior guy cause her grief?
He said it really smarmy, and acted like I had already blamed his cashier for the mistake. I told him that, yes, I pressed it and I took accountability for that. I just wanted him to help me fix it.
The girl at the register was pretty young and when I looked up at her and explained that this was a big problem for me she looked like she expected me to go crazy. The senior cashier got a bit brusque with her, but he explained what she should have done anyway. I think on her part it was more of an “oh shit, I just screwed up and this lady might be really pissed at me” look.
Hell yeah. I was reviewing my statement this evening. (It was a college checking account with Wachovia.) In December, I was reimbursed several times for purchasing emergency parts for use in a group project. Along with money I received for graduation, I ended up making many visits to the bank to deposit money. At the end of my last statement period, I noticed an $8 charge had been tacked on. I called the bank’s customer support line, and they informed me that college checking account holders are only entitled to two visits to a teller each month; additional vists cost $2. :mad: I had my account changed to “free” checking. That experience, combined with the “personal banker” who kept calling my mom to try to talk her into using the bank’s investment services, and the time a teller placed $14,000 of my mom’s money into my savings account (!), almost has me looking for a new bank. They do have a decent online banking service though, and Mom gets a free safe deposit box with her checking account.
Well, that sucks, but this is one reason to use cash, you can’t fuck up or get fucked up by clueless employees where you do business. There have been many threads about advantages of “cashless” transactions. It’s not the end all be all.
I know many young folks with not a lot of money who have got screwed/screwed themselves because of this very reason. If you decide you can spend X amount of money, then take X amount of CASH to the fucking store and do your business.
You cannot get screwed up by paying with paper money. I don’t understand why this would be a problem. If you don’t like the fee for getting cash from an atm, etc then go withdraw cash from the bank the day you go grocery shopping.
There is no reason for the problem in the OP to occur.
As much as their customer service may suck, you pushed the button to start the transaction. I agree with Klaatu. Pay cash.
FWIW, I never use my debit card other than at my bank’s ATM. I either plan ahead of time or I go without. Yeah, it sounds harsh but I used to be a poor college student in the days before debit cards when you either paid cash or, there was no or. It took only one time when I realized I had too little cash and too much hunger that I “paid” for my mistake.
Heh Duckster, reminds of that commercial where the two young dudes are at the checkout with a six-pack and a roll of toilet paper. They didn’t have enough money and the cashier says “paper or plastic?”
The dudes sheepishly say “paper!” 
Let me get this straight - you are that broke and know how extremely important to you it is that you not charge over a certain amount on your card, yet you hit OK at a screen showing a charge for more than that anyway, and you want to blame who again?
No offense, but read the fine print on the overdraft protection agreement. As crazyjoe mentions, the bank is definitely not doing this out of the goodness of their heart - they do it for the same reason that they do everything - to try to make money.
If it is anything like my overdraft protection, it consists of automatically converting the overdraft to a loan at the highest possible interest rate, and making it as inconvenient as possible to do anything but make the minimum payment every month.
I overdrew my account once, by (IIRC) thirty bucks. I then sent a note to the bank that $30 of my next direct deposit of my paycheck should be applied to the balance. They did that. They also applied every single other check to the account balance before they processed the direct deposit of my paycheck, reduced the total overdraft by $30, and then cheerfully began charging me the same interest rate on the new overdraft balance. I had to go into the bank to get this cleared up - they said they couldn’t do it over the phone.
Regards,
Shodan