Best Buy Charges Me Twice, Now I’m Stuck In Refund Limbo

After being misled and provided incorrect information about her purchase, Nicole says Best Buy then managed to charge her debit card twice. Now she’s stuck waiting for a refund and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

Nicole tells Consumerist that she was recently Christmas shopping at a Best Buy in New York when she attempted to buy a camera. The item she wanted was sold out, but the store told her it could be ordered and shipped to her house for delivery by Dec. 12.

Then on Dec. 11, Best Buy e-mails Nicole with some bad news — the camera was now on back-order and she wouldn’t get it until early January.

“I then called Best Buy and asked them if there was a store where I can pick the product up,” she writes. “They told me the Best Buy in Wilmington, DE, had two left.”

So Nicole trekked to Delaware (Home of Tax-Free Shopping) to pick up her order. She showed the cashier her receipt which clearly stated that the item had been paid in full, but the cashier insisted that she needed Nicole’s debit card.

“She said I had to cancel the order and re-charge your card,” Nicole tells Consumerist. “I said OK, thinking it was for their inventory purposes. I then checked my bank statements and found out that she really charged my account twice.”

Nicole again called up Best Buy to see what was going on. The original order did not appear to be canceled and now she had two charges for the same purchase. The phone folks at Best Buy told her there was nothing they could do; she’d have to go back to the Delaware store to clear things up.

And so it was back in the car and off to Wilmington, where Nicole says store employees rudely insisted the refund had been issued.

Unfortunately, because she used her debit card, Nicole is now stuck waiting for her bank to put the refunded funds back into her account. This can be up to 10 business days, per the Electronic Fund Transfer Act.

This means that even though it was Best Buy that (A) convinced her to place an order for an item based on a promised delivery date, (B) failed to notify her that the item couldn’t make that delivery date until the day before it was supposed to arrive, and (C) charged her a second time for an item she’d already paid for, it’s now Nicole that is left twiddling her thumbs.

“What I am upset more about is I was nice about it and they were so rude as if I did something wrong,” says Nicole.

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