Robert and his wife aren’t poor: they’re currently in the process of buying a vacation home. His wife opened up a Macy’s credit card in order to get an additional discount, because yay for discounts! Robert set up “green” or paperless billing after gaining online access to the account, but it turned out to be more like billess billing: they never saw any bills. Should they have noticed that no bills were coming and checked their spam folders? Maybe. But no bills came.

Robert tells us his story in the form of what we think accidentally turned into free-verse poetry. We have left it as he wrote it.

My wife opened a Macy’s account to take advantage of some SALE pricing.
She charged a total of $89.00
She gave me the account information and I set up an online access to the account.
I also paid the account balance.
I also signed up for Green Billing.

A short time later she returned some of the items she bought and grab a couple of other items.
The total difference in the account was a $25.00 charge.
I never received the email that stated we had a balance on the account.
I do not carry balances on any of my charge accounts and did not plan to carry a balance on this one.

I did finally received notice that the account was delinquent and the 25 dollar balance was now 89.00
I immediately paid it.

We are in the process of buying a second home.
This issue showed up on our credit report.

We called Macy’s and the billing department credited the account $35.00
The said they would look into the credit report
I received a call from the credit investigation department and they said there is nothing that they can do.
Sorry
They never sent the bills and it will now cost me several thousand dollars in additional fees and interest.

We will need to furnish this second home, I know I will not be visiting the Macy’s Home Store.

We’ve learned over the years that things are a little confused over at Macy’s credit card HQ. It’s too late for Robert and Mrs. Robert, but this is an important lesson to everyone that green billing can cost you some green if you aren’t careful.

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