Interesting that Belks says they did a credit sweep of all of their accounts and lowered my credit limit to where I now have $4.00 left on my credit limit. I've not missed any payments with them and prior to today had over $100 in credit available.
Now, I had not planned on using my card until Christmas; the plan was to make payments as I always have and then use what was accrued during the Christmas holidays for small gifts for relatives as I did this past holiday season and I'd previously made two payments in 2015 with only interest charges to my account. Apparently, they didn't want me using their card as a savings account and trumped up something from December that had nothing to do with them as reason for the decrease.
Well...as I've stated, I wasn't planning on using their stinky card anyway, but it just shows how companies can change policy midstream and because you have a contract with them, they pretty much dare you to do anything about it.
When I called and went through their ridiculously annoying automated system which has refined its line of questioning down to "So you want me to help you with your credit; say something like 'I want a credit increase'...Me..."I want to speak to an operator"...AS "You want to speak to an operator, what do you want to speak to the operator about...say something like credit card lost". Me "I want to speak to an Operator".
Once I got to an operator. I simply wanted to make it clear for their "recorded message" that I had not missed a payment with them and had made my payments on time, but they were decreasing my available credit limit which previously had been over $100 to $4. Which she confirmed.
This is my recourse. I can talk about my credit evaluation of them and a policy of punishing their customers for NOT spending money with their credit card and give them on a scale of 1 to 100 a percentage credit score of 23%.
23% is about as arbitrary as their decreasing my available credit limit with them however, it is substantiated by the fact that they lowered my limit not based upon missed payment: -33%; nor was it based on a late payment: an additional -33% and I'll tack on an additional -11% for that annoying automated system and customer service.
The only redeeming quality that prevents them from getting a zero is that I did not have an automatic payment plan set up with them, of which they could stop withdrawing payments and then claim that I breached their contract, which is what another company did that led to the Belk credit purge of my account.
And really, Belk didn't need a "reason" for the credit decrease. They did the same thing last summer when I made a few payments without making purchases with my card. The power of a contract plays on the concern of the account holder with their legacy or credit history. Let's see what happens after I've made a few more payments without making a purchase with their card.
No comments :
Post a Comment