Credit Card knowledge

I love that I no longer work on Sundays.  It's so nice to sleep in late, wake up next to my husband, and snuggle for a bit before getting out of bed.  With no plans for the day, I spent most of it just relaxing and doing my own thing.  During an afternoon excursion to Barnes and Nobles I did some seriously thinking about my Investing in Living blog.  I really want to write in it again and I want to cultivate that.  While there, I created some outlines for posts I want to write.  Oddly enough, I really want to write about what I've learned about credit cards.  The job wasn't the best but it taught me a lot of really useful information that has served practical purposes.

I found myself using my knowledge a couple of days ago when Dave was trying to purchase a second cheddar and broccoli soup at Panera.  He called me to say that our credit card declined. He didn't have another form of payment (not the smartest, I know) so if it was declining, one of us wasn't getting soup.   I knew that we had plenty of funds available but I knew that wasn't the only reason for the card to decline and it had just worked so I figured it might be a security thing.  My bank could be declining it because they thought it was a fraudulent purchase so I called them.  One of the things I really like about this particular credit card is that they don't have ridiculous security features so when they told me that it wasn't declining on their end, I wasn't surprised.  Of course, that was really all they said.  The card was not declining on bank's end but it was still declining at Panera.  For Dave this was incredibly frustrating when I told him the bank said the card was okay but it was declining every time Panera tried it.  Something was wrong... and no one gave us an answer as to what.

However, because of my four years in the industry I thought about it quickly.  We were attempting to run a second transaction at the same store for the same amount and it was declining.  It was not declining on the bank's end so it wasn't a security hold.  That meant only one other thing: Panera was blocking the transaction.  The associates there wouldn't know why because their machine just says "declined" but it doesn't say why even though they are the ones declining it which is why they insisted it was our card.  However, I told Dave to change the amount of the transaction-- add a cookie or a beverage and try it again. He did and the transaction went through.  Yay! We could both have soup.  Why did changing the amount work?  Panera has a security feature of their own: it will automatically decline any transaction that appears to be a duplicate.  Because it was the exact same amount on the same card, their machine declined it because it's programmed to flag that as a duplicate charge.  They don't want to accidentally charge someone twice.  Of course, it's a bit outdated.  They easy could program their terminals to notify the associates that it could be a duplicate transaction and they could override it but maybe Panera doesn't trust them enough to do that?

Also, it took me less time to resolve that issue than it did to type about it so if you're thinking "god, that must've taken forever" it really didn't.  It cost us an extra 3 minutes because I knew what was going on.  My credit card customer service rep didn't know why it was declining because it was a merchant issue and Panera's employees didn't know because their terminal doesn't tell them.  It was nice to have the answers.  I want to share it.  Sure, that particular instance was more convoluted but there are other things that so many people don't understand about their cards.  So yeah, I want to write some posts that might help.  I'm weird, I know.  Don't judge.