Complaint Review: HRS Household Retail Service/Best Buy Credit - Baltimore Maryland

I, too, had a horrible experience with Household Retail Service, with my Best Buy Credit Card. I bought a computer from Best Buy in August, 1999. Within two weeks, the price of the computer went down over $200, so I went in to the service desk at the store to get the adjustment put back on the card. At that time, I decided to buy two DVD's as well, to play on my new computer, so I went to the register to check out. The girl there rang the DVD's up incorrectly, causing me to have to wait for over FORTY minutes for a manager to come and fix the two totally separate errors. Well, then the card was not accepted because of the voids and the credit which would be applied within (or so they told me) 72 hours. I left the store without making my purchase, for it had been way too long to wait for the cashier's error to be corrected. That, by the way, was the LAST time I shopped at Best Buy.

But it doesn't end there. I then went home, calling every 24 hours to see if the credit had been given to me, knowing instinctively that there was going to be something fishy with this card. It took two entire weeks to get the credit on the card! I was relieved and sat back to take advantage of the "No payments for 3 months" or whatever the "deal" at the time was to get the card.

I mailed in my second payment on April 13, 2000, courtesy of my internet banking (a check is sent directly from the bank) and watched it as it cleared on April 24. Not even two weeks went by, when I started receiving phone calls from someone named Dawn, whom i did not know. "Hi this is Dawn, please give me a call at 1800-xxx-xxxx," is all it said on my answering machine. Wondering who in the world I knew named Dawn with a 1-800 number I tried calling her back. She never seemed to be there, but there were always plenty of rude and arrogant females there to answer the phone. I was called a b***h by one, when I asked her why Dawn had called me not even one minute earlier, but all of a sudden she had gone home for the day. She then gave in to my plethora of questions and told me "Oh she's not really a person, that is a computerized message we send out to people who do not pay their bills."

Well, that, my friends, was not the right thing to say to me. I became aggravated with the woman, and told her I had paid my bills, and pulled up the bank account on the computer to prove it. She told me I would have to fax a copy of the bank statement and a copy of the cancelled check (which I had to request from my bank) to their office. When I got the check from the bank, I looked at it carefully, to make certain there was no error. As you can probably guess, some complete moron at their office had credited my payment to the wrong account. The number was clearly typed in incorrectly on the endorsement of the check. But of course, when I called them to tell them that I had found the problem, they could not give me any information about anyone else's account. So I faxed everything I had...three times. The first time, and probably twelve harassing phone calls from the company later, the nasty woman on the other end of the line said, and I QUOTE, "Well, if they weren't standing at the fax machine when you sent it, they would have just thrown it away." So I sent it the next day, and immediately called them, and then faxed it a third time, just to be safe. I then called them daily to find out what progress they were making with my account, and it took until July 5th, 2000 for them to finally write me a letter that said:

"Thank you for informing us that there may be a problem with your account..." I laughed out loud. Eventually they took away some of the finance charges and some of the late fees, (not all, but I was just happy that Dawn was not calling me every day), however when I went to buy my house more than a year later, guess who showed up on my credit report??? You guessed it, HRS!!! This company I can truly say is one of the least organized company I have ever dealt with. Their poor attitudes and terrible customer service speak volumes about what kind of company they are trying to run.