Today Chase declined a US$30 charge on my WaMu credit card. It was embarrassing as I was at lunch with my manager and a co-worker. When I got back to my office I called to find out what was going on. My credit limit had been “reduced for non-use.” Okay, fine. Fix it. Five different Chase representatives demurred, saying it “wasn’t possible.” Okay, cancel the account. Not so much as a hand-wave attempt at retaining the account. Never mind that I paid the current balance off electronically two days ago.
I’m familiar with Chase declining my card. It happened last August in Atlanta when Chase declined a pretty big charge at the Grand Hyatt Atlanta in Buckhead. A phone call cleared that one up. Chase just wanted to verify that it was me. That’s bullshit, of course; Chase could have asked the hotel to verify my identification.
Now it’s all coming into focus. I use about half of the available credit line each month, paying the balance off in full each month. Apparently responsible credit use doesn’t appeal to Chase, especially in light of the pending financial industry re-regulation that really isn’t but you can bet there’ll be a lot of Congressional chest-thumping going on.
Shortly after I tweeted my most recent Chase experience, Glenn Fleishman tweeted: “Chase is shedding all its pay-off customers by being as unpleasant as possible. I canceled an acct; they didn’t even try to retain.” Well of course, why try to retain responsible users of credit when you can rely on taxpayer bailouts from here on out.
It probably didn’t help that I’m party to a false credit report class action Chase recently settled.
For now it’s all debit card all the time for me. My bank—which reaped absolutely nothing from the giant “too big to fail” clusterfuck bailout—offers zero liability with 60 day notice of fraud or loss. That’s good enough for now, although I’ve also been advised to link a Schwab One brokerage account with a Schwab Bank Invest First credit card which earns 2% cash back on all purchases. I can find the former on the Schwab site, but not the latter. I’ve asked Chuck, but he really needs to fix his website.
Meanwhile, Jamie Dimon, I hope I live long enough to see you third in line in a perp walk behind Bernie Madoff and Lloyd Blankfein. It will happen.
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