The Thieves We Can't Avoid

Banks, telecommunication companies, and retail stores cost us time and cash by making it nearly impossible to pay our bills.

Ever try to make a payment on the due date? Suppose you are going to have enough money available only on the morning of the day the payment is due. Suppose you have to pay an amount due on a store card with a large “deferred for one year” purchase amount on it, and if you're late paying then you will owe them the interest accrued since the date of purchase (i.e. for one year). And suppose that the interest rate is very high. (Read the contract fine print on the back – it probably is.)

That's the situation I recently found myself in with Home Depot (though the same could have happened at almost any retail store that issues a store credit card). But I found that there was no way to pay on the due date! What ways of paying were available to me? Call the head office or Home Depot Credit Services and pay with a major credit card? Nope, you can't pay off a store card with a credit card. Go in to a store and pay by cash or debit card? Sure, but they'll tell you that your payment may take two to three days to be credited to your account. Of course if it gets there faster, the interest will be all theirs. Never mind that you paid your Home Depot payment in a Home Depot store, and that how they move money around within their corporation ought to be their problem, not yours. I was a salesperson in a retail department store once (not Home Depot) and we had a quota to meet on persuading customers to sign up for the store card. I quietly refused to push it to customers, but let's face it, retail corporations make lots of money on their high-interest store credit cards.

What about telecommunications companies? I'll use Rogers as my example because that company caused a problem for me last weekend. If you pay a Rogers account in a Rogers Store you're told it can take two to three days for your payment to be credited at head office. Paying online at the Rogers website is an option, but the payment still doesn't go through immediately, and when I tried to pay last Saturday for a due-on-Monday bill, their "system was overloaded" – not the first time that has happened. If a telecommunications company can't keep their online system up and running, it makes you wonder. So I ended up driving 53 kilometres return on a Sunday to the nearest Rogers Store to pay, and I don't know if that was soon enough. As for autopay – where the monthly payment is taken automatically from your chequing account or credit card – I found out the hard way that if you have that set up the money will be extracted from your account in the third week of the month (when it's due at the end of the month), which is even more than two to three days before the due date. Also, if there isn't enough money in your account, you'll then get repeated automated phone calls telling you to call some phone number because you are in arrears – which, of course, you are not.

How about the banks? Am I the only one annoyed by the standard practice of debiting an account instantly when I do a transfer from it, but imposing a delay on crediting the amount to the account I am transferring it to, even when it is an account with the same bank? I'm not stupid – if they can debit an account instantly then they can credit an account instantly. It's just a scam to earn the bank more interest, by forcing a time interval during which the money isn't mine – in either account.

So what should be done about this kind of outright thievery, this racket that the stores and financial institutions run? My suggestion: pass legislation (provincial or federal as appropriate) that says any payment made in a company's store must be credited as having been paid at that time on that date, and the same with any online payment. In addition, it should be mandated that a way must be made available to pay on the due date and have it credited on that date. Saying an amount is due on June 2 is fraudulent if there is no way it can be paid and credited on June 2. And it should be legislated that autopay withdrawals never be made earlier than the actual due date.

Finally, for any online bank transfers between accounts, the debit to the source account should not be made earlier than the credit to the destination account. If it's instant then both must be instant. If it takes two days then both must take two days. If the retail companies and banks were smart enough to figure out the present system for benefiting themselves and scamming us, they won't have any problem figuring out how to operate under this framework. They will make less off us of course, but what they do make will be made honestly – in contrast to the present system.