I live in Norway right now, and Norway is insanely expensive. I really need new clothes right now and while shopping for my husband's birthday present, I found out that Macy's was having a One Day Sale and I could get a ton of clothes (10 shirts and a winter coat) for the same price that two sweaters I bought here cost me. We are going back to the States this month, so I planned on just bringing an empty suitcase and having everything shipped to my mom's house. I picked out what I wanted, showed it to my husband and then... got distracted forgot to order it. Not a big deal, because the sale technically started Saturday.
Saturday evening, I try to check out with my clothes and the whole website has gone to hell. It's freezing, reloading, giving me error messages about site traffic... etc. Apparently, the One Day Sale is reeeally popular. We tried for about three hours to order the clothes, even getting so far as to input my credit card info but then the whole thing crashed and I couldn't even get to their front page anymore. We finally gave up and went to bed, though my husband did wake up at 6am to try and check out for me. Still no luck.
On Sunday, I got a generic email from Macy's Customer Service department saying that I could check my order status online. However, there was no order number or any other emails that indicated the order had gone through. I logged back on to Macy's and my cart was still there (and had gone up $200 in price, grrr) like the checkout had NOT been successful. I was confused and logged on to my bank to see whether or not Macy's had actually charged me. And they did. Three separate times, thus causing my account to be over-drawn.
I immediately called Customer Service (and had a hell of time actually getting through to a real person) and explained what had happened. She was very nice but told me that they could not do anything about the charges for at least 3 days. WTF? She said that there wasn't any info in their system yet about what happened so they couldn't do anything to reverse the charges yet. She could see that an order had been attempted on my card, but said that the computer was saying it was never completed. She did say that they would honor the sale price though... if I wanted to try and order again when you know, I wasn't -$100 with the bank. She said if I really needed to use my debit card, I could try calling my bank to see if they would remove the charges. However, I've had to do this a couple of times in the past and the bank has always made me get an entirely new debit card. >: ( This is a huge pain.
Since we rarely use my bank account, I would rather wait to see if the charges are removed soon, like she promised... but it's now Tuesday, and still nothing. I'm also not entirely optimistic about the sale price being honored but will see.
But seriously, what if I had needed to go grocery shopping or pay a bill immediately?