How many times did you run that card??

[Parrothead]

I'd take a printout of your bank statements in next time you go in, but do NOT let them make compies of it. (And fuzz out any account info and any other info on it other than your name and the restaurant's charges if you can).

And contact your CC company to dispute the charges, as well as contacting up the Restaurant chain of command if possible. (To the Owner if you can find them, or to the Head office if it's a chain).

Write up a Letter to the Editor as well and bring it in with you and say if you are not satisfied with how this is dealt with, it will be sent out to the local media and any local ombudsman (and any other Consumer Rights group).

Oh and call the local health board/restaurant inspection agency and explain a brief version of your story hinting that if they're messing up billing, what else might they be messing up?

This. And at this point, to hell with being sucky.

[Ben_Who]

I had a feeling this was going to happen. You could sort of see it developing out of the incomprehensible double-talk the restaurant was giving me. They were sort of manufacturing plausible deniability with their whole, "Well, maybe your bank does it this way" speech.

Trouble is, I know the way my bank "does it." I eat at a lot of restaurants and because I wield my debit card like a lethal weapon, I am constantly perched on the edge of my bank account like a vulture, ensuring that the amount remaining is always sufficient to cover whatever I've charged. This would be the first time in 20 years that the bank figured the right way to deal with a charge was to charge me three times what the bill cost, wait three days, and then charge me the original amount, all without putting any money on hold.

The difference between a "hold" and a "pending" charge (and I've seen "hold" before; it happens at gas pumps) is that with a "pending" charge, checks can bounce if the amount goes below zero. Not so with a hold. "Pending" is just something they put on the transaction for when the purchase is made after banking hours or on weekends and holidays.

At least, that's the way my bank does it. Listening to all that fast-talking yesterday indicated that the server sent to sacrifice was really, really hoping that I didn't know that.

Roommate was charged without the charge ever showing up in HIS "pending" queue, indicating that the card, which was originally run on a Saturday night, was actually run Monday night before 6 PM. (And they must have run it at least once to have the number, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to charge him at all.)

My card was clearly run three times on Saturday night, and all three charges disappeared from the "pending" queue sometime after the banks closed last night and before they opened this morning, replaced with a single charge for the cost of the meal made Saturday night.

It must be a lot harder to pull stuff like this on people who work nights and actually check their bank statements at three, four, and five in the morning. But I'd bet you a bright shiny nickel that if I were to call the dump this morning and tell them all of this stuff, the response would be, "See? Your bank does work like that! It's all the bank's fault, we're in the clear. Um, neener neener neener."

The fact still remains that if my account had been a little closer to zero, stuff would have been bouncing all over the place. It's still early enough in the month for my autopay instruments to land (my power bill touched down today), and my landlord has a bad habit of sitting on rent checks.

At least I got my $55 back, if not the whole amount (I figured the least they could do was comp the meal), I'm free to blog about it as I see fit, and their fried clams are crap anyway. Can't think why anyone would pay $17 for them when you can get some pretty good ones at the Clam Box down the road for half that...

It's simply amazing how all this magically sorted itself out as soon as the elusive manager of a second-rate seafood restaurant discovered that the irate customer was printing out bank statements and photocopying receipts. I must be a wizard.

Love, Who?

[Javarod]

And you know what's real fun? If you're bank is any good, they have records of things you don't see, like oh.... say corrections made on a transaction, and will prolly be happy to give you or at least show you a copy of what they see, including exact dates and times that things were applied to your account.