Walmart Files Lawsuit Against Capital One for “Poor Customer Service” Following Previous Suit Against Synchrony Over “Not Taking on Risky Customers”

Walmart has sued Capital One over “Poor Customer Service” just four years after suing Synchrony for “not taking on risky customers”.

We heard a story like this one back in 2019, when Walmart sued Synchrony on their co-brand card. Remember when Walmart sued Synchrony on their credit card, claiming that Synchrony was refusing to underwrite weak credit card accounts? The WSJ reported that Walmart filed an $800 million lawsuit against Synchrony, claiming lost revenue by Synchrony’s underwriting standards. The suit was later dropped, around the time Walmart shifted their relationship to Capital One.

Now if you have been in the credit card business for a while, you’d know that Capital One works low and mid-range FICO Scores better than most. They have a solid collection infrastructure, leading edge analytics, and they know how to price risky credit card accounts.

-Payments Journal

I seriously doubt that Walmart cares about things such as how quickly transactions post to your credit card or how long it takes on hold to speak to someone at Capital One.

For what it’s worth, I have a Capital One Walmart card and I use it all the time and have never had trouble.

Given Walmart’s last lawsuit against Synchrony, I think it’s safe to say that the real reason for the lawsuit against Capital One may also be about the bank not wanting to take on super bad credit risks so they can shop at Walmart and leave the bank exposed to all of the potential carnage.

I think Walmart doesn’t want to be in the news (again) for complaining that their customers are a bunch of broke deadbeats who don’t pay any of their bills on top of all of the losses they’re taking to shoplifters who set the store on fire to run out with television sets, and that they want their banking partners to be a bunch of bottom-feeding low lives who will take on any risk no matter how bad just to keep the Walmart account.

Capital One is a bank that makes a lot of money working the low end of the income spectrum, so it’s unclear as to who the next bank would even be.

For what it’s worth, Capital One Bank is suing Walmart right back, and in their complaint, they basically accuse Walmart of trying to Darth Vader the contract in the middle of its term and using the lawsuit to gain leverage.

I have no idea where this will end, but I can say I’ll be less inclined to just shop at Walmart without the incentives provided by their card.

T-Mobile Says Get Ready to Lose Your AutoPay Discount if You Use a Credit Card. Bonus: Automated Super Depressing McDonalds

T-Mobile Says Get Ready to Lose Your AutoPay Discount if You Use a Credit Card

T-Mobile has had like eight data breaches in the past 5 years, and recently a banner popped up on my account stating that if I continue paying with a credit card, which has strong fraud protection, then I will lose my AutoPay discount for not switching to bank drafts or debit cards, which have weak fraud protection.

I’m extremely leery about giving a company with such awful security practices direct access to my bank account, and I’ve noticed from reading Reddit posts that this is exactly what other customers say about them too.

T-Mobile is obviously sick of paying for people’s credit card rewards, but thieves have made off with so much data about their customers, that do you want your bank account exposed too? Just try fixing that!

To make things worse, you have to not only log in to the T-Mobile account to see the alert. You have to navigate to “Manage AutoPay” to see the warning, so for millions of customers, T-Mobile will just start raising their bill $10 a month and they’ll never notice, but T-Mobile can say “It was posted that Earth was going to be blown up to make room for a hyperspace bypass. It’s not our fault you didn’t see that!”

I’m seriously considering just canceling, paying what’s left on our phones (which has mostly been taken care of by bill credits), and popping some MVNO SIM cards from Walmart in them to get rid of T-Mobile at this point.

Literally the only nice thing about T-Mobile is that their customer service people in the Philippines are friendly enough. My spouse tried speaking to one of them in Tagalog, though, and the guy said they’re only allowed to speak English via corporate policy.

They’re probably being spied on or something. Who knows? Everyone on Earth gets to live in an increasingly shitty boring Corporate Dystopia.

On an unrelated note, today Fox News posted about an automated McDonalds.

It looked super depressing. There was nobody eating in the restaurant, there was no interaction with employees. It’s turned into some sort of rat puzzle where people come in, tap tap tap a screen, slide a card, and literally food comes out of a conveyor belt.

The restaurant was just so sterile and dark and robotic. Man, fuck this.

I told Roy about this and he said cook and stay home. Fair enough. I don’t like where this is going. It’s already hard enough to stay employed out there, for blue collar and white collar alike. They’re shitting on all of us lately.

McDonalds told its corporate employees to stay home this week so they can’t sabotage anything or have “incidents” while the bean counters go over who to fire, by e-mail.

I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell them, as a customer, that this isn’t a good look on them, and I’m not going to participate in “rat in a maze” puzzles for a goddamned cheeseburger.

Anyway, maybe they’ll get on the GPT bandwagon at McDonalds and I won’t even have to order anymore because the “AI” can just decide what I want and being wrong 90% of the time, as usual, is just acceptable if it means firing a person.

Capital One and MasterCard make final ruling in my favor against Batteries Plus Bulbs, but where did Chargebacks come from?

Capital One and MasterCard made a final ruling in my favor against Batteries Plus Bulbs after the merchant chose to go ahead and accept it, but where did Chargebacks come from?

I wrote yesterday that Capital One and MasterCard ruled in my favor in my dispute against Batteries Plus Bulbs for “service not rendered”, but where did Chargebacks come from?

Before the mid-1970s in the United States, credit cards existed, but they were not widely used or accepted.

Practically anyone who got your card or just the number could charge anything they wanted to it, and you wouldn’t know they did until you got the bill at the end of the month, and there was no way to object to any of it.

This led to massive fraud against cardholders at the time, because merchants would say your total came to one amount and then sneak other charges and fees onto your card later, and they’d slide it through a machine that used carbon paper to make a copy of the raised numbers that the cards back then had on them.

Sometimes more than one billing cycle would go by before people could even see a charge go on their cards, and so with anyone being able to copy and use their numbers, it was often impossible to tell which store had defrauded them or given their card information to scammers, even if they kept meticulous transaction records.

So credit cards were used by few people, for major purchases, and then it was uncommon to even carry them with you.

If you paid in cash, the most that could happen is the merchant cheated you, but the losses would be stopped at the amount of cash you handed them.

The Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974 changes everything.

The card industry wanted more people to accept their cards, and they knew people were hesitant to use them because the losses could be severe and potentially unlimited if they did, so they petitioned the Congress to create the Chargeback procedure in 1974, by law.

Since Chargebacks were created, cards have generally been safer than cash. If a thief steals your card, you dispute the transactions and you’re not liable for the fraud. If you had lost cash, you’d have lost all the cash.

Also, today it is very easy to see what transactions are coming through on your credit cards, in real time, and know immediately if you need to take action on a given item.

With cards, if a merchant bills you and then never sends you the goods, or the goods are shoddy or delivered in an unacceptable state, you have options, and can respond immediately, without going to court, to deal with petty disputes.

Today, credit cards are an excellent way to mitigate your losses as a consumer.

You need evidence, but it’s easier than going to court, and you can get your money back if you persist.

In my case against the Batteries Plus store in Gurnee, Illinois, I filed a Chargeback because I bought a service, the merchant performed it incompetently, and the end result was that the service I paid for was unusable. After a 6 week process of pursuing a Chargeback, the bank ruled for me and the merchant admitted that they couldn’t maintain their case that the “goods and services were delivered in good condition” anymore.

While the Chargeback is a weapon in the consumer’s arsenal that protects them from fraud and underhanded merchants, it must never be abused.

If you file many Chargebacks and the bank rules that they were without merit, they could start sanctioning you.

The reason why I’ve never had to file one before is that I know that they’re intended to be used as a last resort before you have to give up and sue somebody.

You should never go off half-cocked with these. You must be prepared to show the bank the proof.

In this case:

1. I tried to get the merchant to repair the product and he made things worse.
2. I then tried to ask for a refund to be initiated by the merchant, so that I could have my money back, and he wouldn’t be damaged by losing a Chargeback and dispute fees to his store, and he refused, and openly threatened and verbally abused me over the phone.
3. I then had to incur additional expenses to make the product work right, including paying a Buick dealer to perform the exact same service.
4. The Buick dealer wrote a letter for me to give to the bank stating that there was nothing wrong with my car, and it would not accept the programming that the Batteries Plus store attempted to perform on it because he did it wrong and sold incompatible parts.

I’ve had to assist in filing Chargebacks for an ex before, but those were different cases, so I already knew generally what the process was.

In his case,

1. In 2016, when we lived in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, he was mugged. The mugger got away with his phone and his debit card. I filed a chargeback for approximately $46 that the man was able to charge to that card before I could freeze all of John’s accounts. John got his $46 back from the bank.
2. John dropped his credit card and didn’t notice when he was paying for a coffee at the airport he worked at (Midway, the Dunkin’ Donuts on the Midway Orange Line station stop.). Later in the day, someone picked it up and went to eat at Uncle Julio’s Mexican Restaurant, and charged $156 to the card. I filed a “stolen credit card” dispute against the transaction and won after providing the bank with a police report where John stated how he lost the card.
3. In 2017 (I think) we ordered a Nintendo Switch for John. I found a good price at B&H Photo in New York City. I asked for “signature required” on the invoice so that UPS couldn’t drop it off to be stolen on our doorstep in Roger’s Park. UPS ignored the “signature required” part and dropped it off. It got stolen. I asked B&H Photo to replace it, they told me no. I disputed it and B&H Photo sent Capital One a letter accusing John of keeping the Switch, lying in his statement that it had been stolen, and other things in their “re-presentment”. I appealed the re-presentment with evidence that UPS never required a signature, and Capital One ruled in favor of John. We then bought a Nintendo Switch at Target.

In both cases where I had to respond to a re-presentment, Batteries Plus Bulbs in Gurnee, Illinois in my case, and B&H Photo in New York City with John, my ex, the merchants replied by lying and slandering the consumer.

I don’t know if this is typical or not, but it happened with B&H Photo and Batteries Plus Bulbs.

I think what may be the case is that merchants hate Chargebacks, they just don’t want to lose because there are consequences for losing them that go way beyond being forced by the bank to refund the customer the amount of the dispute, and so merchants develop this “throw mud at the customer even if it’s lies and slander, and see what sticks”.

I’ve heard that merchants end up losing about 4 out of every 5 Chargeback cases. Some are obviously pissed and are willing to get downright nasty about it.

There are things that merchants can do if they want to head off Chargebacks at the pass.

Provide excellent customer service.

“The customer is always right.”

If you refund a small amount of money and go your separate ways when you know inside your heart that you’re wrong and can’t make the situation right, it will build rapport with your customers.

They will come back and spend more of their money at your store and tell their friends to go there because you were a big enough person to admit you were wrong and make them whole again.

On the other hand, if you scream at them, refuse to help, and say you’re keeping their money and don’t come back or you’ll have them charged with trespassing, then don’t be surprised when you get slapped with a Chargeback.

Then when they’re done with that, they’re going to get on all of the review Web sites and make sure everyone knows you’re a crook who cheated them and who doesn’t stand by your products and won’t give them their money back. Which would you rather have happen?

Listen to your customers when they tell you to do something.

If a customer says they want Signature Required on their delivery, then select Signature Required on the delivery.

There’s no use doing what B&H Photo did to us and complaining about it later when something goes missing and the customer can show where they requested Signature Required and also that you sent the shipment without it, and UPS can’t say what happened to it because you wanted to save a dollar or two when you shipped it.

In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll just make signature requirement on delivery mandatory when an order exceeds a threshold in dollar value beyond which you aren’t comfortable risking.

If you own a store that takes credit cards, train your cashiers and waiters to require Photo ID to accept the card, and document which ID it was in your files.

That way, if a credit card is stolen, you don’t have to eat the Chargeback later, and if a customer eats there, pays, and then tries to Chargeback and claim it wasn’t them, you can prove that they’re pulling something on the bank.

In none of my examples, were we at fault.

Had the merchants behaved better and developed and implemented simple effective policies to avoid dealing with pissed off customers and Chargebacks, none of the examples I’ve given would have ever happened.

But I suppose for Batteries Plus Bulbs and B&H Photo, they think it’s easy to be crooked and sloppy and then lie and defame their customers later, in a failed attempt to slime their way out of the resulting case.

And you know what? They lost. So it didn’t work.

The websites offering your business “Chargeback handling” want your money, so they’ll never give you great advice on how to stop it from happening. If they did, your business would have more money because you wouldn’t have so many Chargebacks, and you wouldn’t have to pay them to represent you after you screwed up.

Ditched T-Mobile Home Internet for Comcast.

T-Mobile Home Internet has been getting worse in my area, to the point it was intolerable. I finally applied for the Affordable Community Broadband program and was approved.

The ACB credit qualified me for free 60 Mbps down / 11 Mbps up on Comcast, and free is good, so I ditched the T-Mobile.

The T-Mobile Home Internet Nokia modem is absolute garbage. It could almost never reliably lock on to a 5G signal, and when it could, it usually didn’t even perform at the minimum speed that they guarantee in an area. They say they won’t sell service in an area unless you can get 25 Mbps, but routinely I was left with half or two thirds of that, and that was in between modem crashes. Sometimes six or seven per day.

I finally realized why it would crash so much. It’s because the thing is so full of bugs and they roll out new firmware constantly and it’s never any better than it was before, but also this modem is a portable space heater and eventually it will just fry itself. Before it konks out totally, it will just become unstable because of heat buildup, so you have to set it on top of a fan just so it won’t crash so much.

Anyway, with the free broadband from Comcast and the ACB program, I finally have a stable Internet connection again for the first time in a while and I’m not fighting with my spouse over the “worse than DSL in 2005” experience that T-Mobile Home Internet brings with it.

When I called to cancel T-Mobile, they got it canceled, but they made me figure out how to print off a shipping label, which means I had to forward it to FedEx near where my spouse works as a print job (because I hate printers), and I’ll pick it up on Monday (my birthday) along with a Buick that I’m closing a deal on. It’s going to be a very good day.

Just out of spite, I added “Super Crappy T-Mobile Home Internet Pod Enclosed. May it toast in the fires of Silicon Hell.” to the bottom of the shipping return label.

It is eye opening what having lousy Internet service for 6 months is like. The only actual reason I could see for buying this product is if you live in the middle of a cornfield and it’s this or satellite Internet.

The one upside is that the customer support people in the Philippines are always so nice to talk to.

I don’t blame them at all for this shitfest that T-Mobile calls an ISP, because they’re obviously not running the company. I just don’t think T-Mobile Home Internet is going to be a thing for much longer if it can’t do better than COMCAST.

While I can’t knock free, I also mistakenly called into the regular Comcast line before realizing that Internet Essentials is operated like another company. I noticed their paying customers don’t get a lot of support anymore.

Comcast has started closing customer service at night (used to be 24 hours a day) and forcing people to deal with a lot of menus and prompts and a chat robot on their website or SMS text messaging system and it takes 30 minutes of poking around telling it none of this applies before it will hand you off to a real person who can actually solve a problem. The rest is just this dumb “Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in or do you want to pay your bill now?” 500 times along the way.

ZDNet says that McDonalds will be like this pretty soon too.

I wonder what ordering a hamburger will be like when the machine can’t understand you and there’s nobody to help and customers start driving away in frustration. McDonalds is big, but they don’t have a monopoly on hamburgers and fries, so what works for Comcast won’t necessarily work for them.

Sam Walton’s management books should be a required reading everywhere.

My favorite quote was “There is only one boss, and that’s the customer, and he can fire everyone in the company from the CEO to the person stocking the shelves by taking his money elsewhere.”.

Unfortunately, we’re to the point where even Walmart is acting like that’s not true when, if they were a little smarter, they could kick Amazon in the nuts and walk away with all of that lost revenue.

The overall trend here is that big companies that already effectively have a money printing press and are more profitable than ever thanks to fake inflation (raising prices because they can and blaming it on the President or something) are also cutting customer service to the bone.

This mentality is a diseased way of thinking about customer service. They consider it a “department” instead of a way of running their business. An expense to be trimmed.

You’ll probably hang up the phone before you talk to a person after being filibustered by chat robots for so long that it puts Strom Thurmond’s action against the Civil Rights Act in a distant second place.

The whole scheme is to send you to a human as a last resort so that everyone who is too busy to deal with an issue goes away. If you’re calling to cancel something, you’re also not a priority even though good customer service means taking care of the customer when they don’t want to be your customer anymore.

In a free market, or at least one with some competition, this could never work. People could tell their friends, “Don’t use that business. It sucks. Can you believe how much it sucks?”, but when you have a monopoly on cable internet or have traditionally been a monopolist and public menace like Microsoft, you can get away with lousy customer service at that point, because you don’t have to please customers if you make it hard to run away.

Linus Torvalds once joked that if you manage to crash the Linux kernel with a program, it gets investigated, but if you tell someone you’ve crashed the Windows kernel, they just stare at you and say “I’ve got programs like that and they came with Windows.”.

It’s very clear why Comcast doesn’t fight Internet Essentials.

They have no reason to. Even at $10 a month they at least break even on you, and the ACB program even pays them for that.

The alternative is to draw serious regulatory attention to themselves and maybe get broken apart by the Sherman Antitrust Act.

To actually get to the “free Internet”, you have to sign up for three different things. Internet Essentials, which kicks you out to the FCC website for Lifeline, then you fill out an application with the National Verifier, and once approved, you get a code. You take it back to Comcast, they approve you for Internet Essentials, you activate your Internet account, and maybe pay your first bill of $9.95, and then you go back, apply for Comcast’s ACB program, and paste in the same National Verifier code, and then hopefully it takes you down to $0 a month for a while.

They don’t want that to be easy. If it was extremely easy, everyone would just click a button and go “$100 a month to Comcast for Internet? Click click, BULLSHIT!”.

In fact, they used to have a cool down period where you couldn’t have been a regular Comcast subscriber in the past 6 months, so that people wouldn’t cancel their paid service even if they qualified for Internet Essentials. Nasty.

I also noticed that Comcast is offering “low cost” PCs.

The Windows 11 model has slightly higher specs than the Chromebook. I’d suggest the Windows 11 model if Windows can be wiped off of a Dell Latitude 3120. They call it an educational laptop and their marketing page says “lesson learned”.

The only lesson with a $150 Windows computer is how poorly Windows runs on a $150 computer. It doesn’t run well on a good computer. How well do you think a “Celery” processor and 4 GB of RAM are going to hold up?

Fedora, on the other hand, could actually work out fine in this case.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about Fedora 36, which I’m using right now. The GNOME 42 and KDE spins have both come a long way towards being less bloated and far less notorious for memory leaks and more performant. KDE is even used on Pinebooks now.

Add in the fact that Fedora is also using ZRAM and Early-OOM, and it should hold up okay on 4 GB RAM. Windows 11 won’t.

One of the truly awful things about Windows 11 isn’t just that it’s a big rusty pig of the operating system world, it’s that the compressed memory setup isn’t even using an algorithm that is optimized for speed, so it slows you down so your OEM can screw you on RAM.

Fedora uses ZSTD compression for ZRAM and the BtrFS file system (which also reduces disk writes).

I think it would work fine on the Dell Latitude 3120, and it could turn a miserable experience the government is propping up Microsoft with into an enjoyable little computer that may even in fact run some old console emulators and Free Software games (including GZDOOM, obviously).

If the government is in the business of supporting low and lower-middle income people with computers, it ought not be spamming those people with malicious proprietary software like Windows 11, and then the other malicious software, such as ransomware, which inevitably ends up setting up camp in Windows 11, but as long as the user can at least fix it (which I don’t know if you can, so you’ll need to research this) by turning off “Secure Boot” and installing a Free and Open Source operating system, then they may want to take advantage of the super cheap hardware.

The Comcast xFI gateway wanted me to use an app to activate it, so I had the lineman take care of that for me before he left. Comcast could easily make it so your modem worked without installing spyware on your Android or iPhone, but they don’t.

Remember when they demanded to run a Windows program and then carpet bombed you with browser toolbars and trialware?

Luckily, I could just call an agent back then and say “Look, I don’t have Windows. Can you activate it on your end?”.

If it seems like nobody at the T-Mobile store wants to help you, it’s not just you. Here’s why.

We have to go to the T-Mobile store today to return the modem that died on me after five minutes that I blogged about yesterday.

The T-Mobile store employees are incompetent to the highest order and they basically don’t give a damn about anything other than selling you a phone every time you’re in there. Once they realize that you’re not there to buy a phone, they hem and haw and make up excuses about why you need to go elsewhere.

So I’m already cringing.

Former T-Mobile employees have said they aren’t customer service people and nobody wants to open your account unless they’re selling a phone because it counts as doing something else, they don’t get their commission money, and then you can rate them and it may be a low rating and they are taking a risk for nothing from their perspective. Meanwhile, someone else may get the money for signing up another victim. It’s like Mary Kay cosmetics or Amway.

So every single one of them knows that if the customer is not there to buy something, get rid of them like they were the plague.

That’s always been my experience in their stores ever since T-Mobile bought my account.

If there’s something wrong with your phone, the store won’t help. They’ll demand you buy another phone at full price, even if their network is sabotaging your phone that they sold you 10 months ago and you can prove it.

If you need technical assistance with your phone, they’ll refuse to help, unless you bought their very expensive (because of iPhones going up in price by 80% in the last few years) “phone insurance” scam.

If you need them to do anything at all, you’re wasting your gas, and they may even insult you to your face while you’re in there.

Essentially, doing business with T-Mobile is like going on a date with some two pump chump, and as soon as the transaction is over, they disappear.