🚀 go-pugleaf

Not everyone is smart or educated enough to be able to handle balancing
their checkbook every month.  What seems to you to be something that
only "retards" don't do is, in fact, difficult or impossible to a lot
of people.

Independent of the intelligence / education issue, the people who live
on the edge, paycheck to paycheck, tend to have one thing incommon --
the have virtually no "spare" time.  When they get done with caring for
their families and working the multiple slave-wages jobs that they need
to make ends meet, they are lucky to get a few hours of sleep before
waking up to do it all over again.  Finding a few hours every month to
balance their bank account to the penny is a luxury they literally
can't afford.

For these people, using a debit card is actually a very intelligent way
to keep a handle on their spending.  The assumption that debit card
transactions are processed nearly immediately is, in the vast majority
of cases, a perfectly reasonable one.  This is especially true since
the banks USE THIS AS ONE OF THE SELLING POINTS OF DEBIT CARDS. 
Whether they should be doing that is an interesting question, but I
don't think that poor, harried people should be left holding all the
blame when the promises made to them by the banks to get them to use
debit cards don't hold up.

If, indeed, their transactions are posted promptly, then all they need
to do to avoid overdrafting is check their balance on a regular basis
and don't spend more than they have, perhaps leaving a buffer for the
charges made in the last day or two to give them time to be processed.
They certainly should not be expected to have to account for five
months of missing transactions that suddenly show up all at once.

Claiming that the overdraft fees that these people paid will "teach
them a lesson" and that they will "learn not to make the same mistake
in the future" is foolish.  If they had the intelligence, education and
time to be able to keep track of all their spending to the penny as
some of us (including myself) do, then they'd already be doing it. 
Rather, they probably aren't doing it because, for whatever reason,
they can't, and being socked with fees after five months of CTA
transactions show up all at once is only going to make them angry and
bitter and quite possibly literally take food out of their mouth or
make it harder for them to pay the rent or the heaeting bill.

Someone in this thread asked how it should have been handled.  The
answer to this is related to the point someone else in the thread
made, i.e., that businesses seem to have forgotten how to treat
customers properly.  This should have been handled in one of two ways:

1. The customers who were affected should have been sent letters
notifying them that certain transactions were not handled properly
giving the amount of mishandled transactions, and explaining that they
would be deducted from the customers' accounts on some specific date
far enough into the future for the customers to be able to plan on it
and make sure that sufficient funds would be available.

2. The CTA should have written off the delayed transactions.

Both of these would have been more ethical and customer-friendly than
simply sticking the transactions into their passengers' accounts.

It seems to me that what is missing from a lot of the postings in this
thread, including the posting from Scott which started it, is one of
the most important ingredients of a healthy society; compassion.

-- 
Jews for Obama (http://www.jews4obama.com/)