The Macy’s bomb

First, let me assure you that you are not alone if you are just now figuring out that your credit cards are touchy little bombs, ticking away in your wallet and ready to blow no matter how careful you are.

In the past the only way to know how these cards worked was to read and decode the disclosures that come with the bill. What a handy word, disclosure. It’s derived from Latin roots meaning “dense, impenetrable jargon in 4-point type.”

Since the last round of changes to credit-card regulations, however, we have greatly improved “transparency,” meaning less Byzantine code about “grace periods” and obscured interest rates.

We do indeed have clearer info at our fingertips. As proof, I offer this quote from my January Macy’s bill:

“As a result of the minimum INTEREST CHARGE of $2.00 being applied to your revolving account, the actual ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE charged on that account is 60.84%.”

(The capitalization is theirs. What better way to be transparent than to use uppercase letters, right?)

I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I do appreciate the clarity of that “60.84%” spelled out in type large enough to read. I appreciated it right through my nose with the half-cup of coffee I inhaled as I read the bill for the first time.

And I do appreciate Macy’s. If you’ve had a charge account at this mother-of-all-department-store-chains in the past, you know they bend over backwards to make it easy for you to buy things and feel smugly special. Coupons, cardholder sale days, even a “Star” club for those of us who really know how to shop. The Macy’s charge-account marketing people do everything but pick us up and drive us to the January white sale.

Now they have embarked on a breathtakingly clever strategy. It works this way:

(1) On Monday you charge $180 worth of stuff.

(2) On Wednesday you pay the bill in full online.

(3) Approximately two weeks later you get a bill that pretends you didn’t pay yet. The bill is for $180 and a $2 “interest charge.” (Remember, the payment was not late.)

(4) All of this is kosher because they spell out the interest rate associated with this out-of-nowhere interest charge.

When you dial them up to complain, the folks living on the other side of the world who answer such calls will assure you that the $2 will be credited back to you next month.

Thoughtlessly you go online and transfer another $2 to keep the account current. Only later it dawns on you that you’ve sent Macy’s a two-buck tip and asked them to keep it safe for a month, then give it back as a credit towards more stuff in their store.

I know: No one with a real job would dog this issue for a measly $2. And I won’t punish you by recreating the dialogue I had with the polite customer-service agent sitting 14 time-zones away. The bottom line is that refusing to pay the $2 is pretty much pissing into the wind. Feels good for a second, and then….not.

So, the choices are clear: Cancel your card and give up those discount coupons. Or resort to an Abbie Hoffman-like  gesture and pay the interest charge in some annoying way, such as sending a box of pennies or transferring an odd overpayment, like $2.02, via your online bill payer.  Or pay $1.98 today and .05 two days later. Yeah, way to mess with that computer’s mind!

It won’t diffuse the little wallet bomb, but you’ll feel better having lobbed one back over the fence.