Have you ever looked at your credit card statement and realized you were accidentally double charged for a purchase? If you were in that situation, what would you do? Would you call the store or the credit card company?

I’d probably call the credit card company, but in this story, the customer calls the store. She claims she lives in another city and can’t come back to the store, so she’s hoping to get her refund over the phone.

That’s not how it works.

But the crazy part is what happens the very next day.

Keep reading for the whole story.

No, you can’t have your money back

At my store, we occasionally get people trying to get their money back for free, when they have very clearly purchased a perfectly good product.

So, one of the girls I work with (workmate: WM) worked a Sunday shift where a customer (C) purchased around $90 worth of stock – which is a relatively large spend for our store.

Our average sale is around $30 as we get a lot of kids.

Anyway, WM remembered that customer because she spent a lot and was the only person that day to use an AMEX card that day instead of Eftpos/Visa.

The customer claimed there was a problem.

The next day, I was working with WM and we got a phone call from C, claiming that she had been double charged for her ~$90 purchase the previous day, which WM immediately thought was fishy because there’s literally no way that could happen on our system unless the entire transaction was put through twice, and the person paid twice.

Giving her the benefit of the doubt, WM calmly said, “yup, come back in with your receipt and we can refund you!”

But C was having none of it. She claimed that she lived out of the city, and wasn’t planning on coming back in for a while, so couldn’t we just refund her over the phone?

Our system only allows refunds in person, and we have to have proof of purchase to give someone their money back (logically), so WM explained that to C, who then asked if she could get the refund over email.

Once again, it has to be done in person.

WM, again, said that we literally can’t do that. Besides not having proof of purchase, we are physically unable to reimburse money in that fashion.

C had a huge angry rant at WM, who just “mmhmm’d” and “sorry’d” until C hung up.

She turned to me and explained what happened.

We looked up the transactions from yesterday and found a digital copy of her receipt, as well as a transcript of every transaction from the day so we could pinpoint when she came in and what she got. Shockingly, there was no evidence of a double charge.

Then the customer’s friend called.

When WM was away on break, I got a phone call from C’s friend (F). F angrily told me that C had been “double charged, and she was told she would have to come back in to get a refund, and she’s not planning on visiting [city] anytime soon, and is there nothing else you can do?!”

I calmly told her that we aren’t able to process refunds digitally or over the phone. I also explained that we looked up the purchase and had absolutely no record of a double charge, which we can show her when she comes in.

Unfortunately, because we have no evidence of an overcharge on our end, I told her that we would need both a receipt and a bank statement to show us that her card had been charged twice from our company on the same day. If they could do that, we could happily refund. If not, they would likely have to contact the bank as the error seems to be between them and the bank, and not our system.

F grumpily said thanks and hung up.

This is crazy!

We never heard from them again.

Ironically, WM served C again the next day and C didn’t say a word about the matter.

If you’ve worked retail, you’ll know that one of the most satisfying things in the world is very politely explaining exactly why someone is wrong – and they can’t get mad at you because you’re both right and civil.

So the customer lied about living in another city and not coming back in? I’m wondering if the customer was confused and was double charged by a different store.

Let’s see how Reddit responed.

It was a missed opportunity.

This person has a theory about what happened.

It would be an easy fix.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about an employee who decided to push back against time micromanagement.

Another person has to deal with the same problem.

If she really was double charged, I hope she called the credit card company. They would see the duplicate charge and take it off her credit card statement.

What’s weird is that she claimed she wasn’t going back to that store because she lived in another city yet she went back to that store the very next day. That makes me wonder what else she was lying about. Otherwise, I would see it as a mistake about the double charge that she could easily straighten out with a call to AmEx.

Some customers have crazy requests!