Coming soon to the derposphere: BIDEN IS GIVING POOR PEOPLE CREDIT CARD DEBT RELIEF I GOT A TEXT ABOUT IT AND THAT’S SOCIALISM
I ended up getting several calls from someone in NM or AZ asking for Mildred or similar name. Would plow right through my answer and commence with the weather and ailments update. Lasted a few months.
A little concerned I got the number cause the old lady died. More than a little concerned that the calls stopped cause the old guy calling me had passed.
So after driving across the country and ending the lives of countless insects in the Midwest, the front grill/hood of my car is wall to wall bug splatter. So when I got gas today and the pump at the Sinclair station offered me a car wash, I said yes and paid $9. I pull around to the car wash and… it’s closed. I immediately know I’ve been had, and I probably won’t get a refund without a fight, cause that’s how this fucking disgraceful country works.
I park and go inside, it’s a 7-11 attached, and she tells me, “Yeah this doesn’t expire until June 14, so you’ll have to come back.”
I’m like, listen, I’m not coming back, I just want a refund. This isn’t a convenient place for me to come back to get a car wash (it’s far from where I’m staying, just happened to be passing by), and I don’t want a car wash in two weeks, I want one today. She says there’s nothing she can do about it, it’s not their fault the car wash isn’t working.
I’m thinking… Yeah, well it’s not mine either lady. I know you are the cashier and you didn’t break the goddamn car wash, but it’s not like I snuck in there with a sledgehammer in some master plan to pay $9 and get $9 back.
I remain polite and I’m like, look, you sold me a car wash, you can’t give me a car wash, so I need a refund. She says she didn’t sell me anything. I’m like, I’m not saying you personally sold me a car wash, this business that you are working in sold me a car wash. She’s like well no the store is separate from the pumps and we have no control over anything paid for through the pumps. I’m like ok, who does? Who do I need to call? She’s like it’s Sinclair but you can’t call them.
Now they’re really pushing all my buttons. Nothing sends me onto raging tilt more than corporations that fuck you that don’t even have a customer service line that you can spend 90 minutes of your time on trying to get un-fucked.
I’m like, “Listen, someone got my $9. My $9 didn’t just evaporate into thin air. So someone needs to give me a car wash or my $9 back.” At this point she’s let’s out an exasperated breath like I’m an unreasonable idiot, “You can’t get a refund, I can get my boss but she’s going to tell you the same thing.” Okay, give me the boss then.
So the assistant manager comes out and gives me the same runaround but even less polite. We go around in circles a couple times like this is a fucking complicated problem. She’s raising her voice at me, so I raise mine in turn. Like I’m not paying you $9 to NOT get a car wash, this is ridiculous. I tell her it’s pretty simple. I was sold a service that cannot be provided, and someone is giving me a refund, and I don’t care if it’s them or Sinclair, but I’m gonna need a refund or a phone number to get a refund from. She’s rude and tells me that it’s physically impossible to give me a refund since I paid for it at the pump, but she can get her manager, who will tell me the same thing (and the tone in her voice is that I’m an idiot and an asshole).
I’m like yes please, manager, thanks. She comes out 5 minutes later on the phone with the manager, hits the (physically impossible) void car wash button, and hands me $9 in cash. I resist the urge to mock the bullshit lines she was feeding me, get my initial receipt back which she doesn’t want to give me (I told her to rip the car wash part off if she wanted but I was keeping my gas receipt and she finally gave up and did it), and get the fuck out of there boiling mad.
What a fucking scam. How many people do you think they get a day with that? Five? 10? And from the way the employees were acting, I’m actually wondering if they were getting a cut or something. The whole thing was fucking insane. I assume like 10-20% of people come inside and only like 10% of the ones who do refuse to leave and keep arguing until they get their money bank.
These assholes are probably stealing thousands of dollars a month from average folks trying to get a fucking tank of gas and a car wash.
Fuck this corporate country man, fuck this shit, fuck this economy, fuck this society. We’re getting scammed and ripped off absolutely constantly.
8 Likes
What a horrible experience. Good for you for getting your eff money back.
1 Like
I would’ve given up much quicker and just filed a charge back with the credit card.
4 Likes
Yeah refusing to pay for the gas either is the way to handle this. You don’t want to give me a refund for a 9 dollar car wash? OK then I won’t pay for the gas either. Good job dumbass.
1 Like
This is the way. You would have won the dispute too. Not worth the aggravation.
1 Like
It sounds like he already paid for the gas on his credit card.
I thought it was one of those upcharge at the pump and it gets added to your gas situations.
4 Likes
That was my next threat, but in my lifetime my record on chargebacks is like 1 for 2, so I didn’t want to chance it.
Not sure how that would go on the charge back, maybe. Had I thought of that as a possible outcome, gambling to get the whole $58 back or whatever was definitely higher EV than staying there arguing. I was figuring if I went the charge back route I’d get the $9 back like 70% of the time and nothing 30%.
Leaving was still higher EV for me considering the aggravation or how I’d otherwise use the time, but I know that’s how they make their money off this shit and I was too angry.
Yeah it was this, but my card was already swiped at the pump so it was already charged.
I mean you just tell your credit card company you didn’t receive the services they charged you for and you dispute the charge. Then Sinclair has to do something about it. The credit card company probably ends up eating it eventually. Don’t feel bad about that them eating costs like this from time to time is why they get to charge a 2-3% swipe fee every time you use the damn thing.
It’s also a sufficiently large pain in the ass that Sinclair will want to fix their stupid car wash if more than a few people do it.
Regardless even if you dispute it and it doesn’t stick you can be 100% certain Sinclair lost money on the transaction. In a spot like this it’s not about the 9 bucks, it’s about large corporations not getting the read that they can steal from me.
I have excellent credit which means I pay what I owe. It also means that if I don’t pay you I will suffer exactly zero consequences. I’ll still be able to borrow at prime interest rates and unless I do it to several people in a row, people will assume that I am right. If you’re a corporation you’ll treat me well or I’ll treat you exactly the way you treat people who don’t treat you well.
I also don’t believe in settling lawsuits unless I’m actually for sure liable for an actual tort. You pay one extortionist and the number of extortionists you meet goes up five fold. I really cannot overstress how much better my life is not being known as a soft touch. We live in a golden age of corporate bullshit and outright white collar crime, being low hanging fruit for them is bad juju.
Exactly.
Yep, this drives me nuts. And the Boomers being all, “This is the greatest country in the world, all the good businesses are honest, and if you work hard everything will work out for you!” sends me to the lawnmower and rocket stores.
Yeah, the Boomer generation really has a lot working against them getting anything resembling the respect they think they deserve:
-
It used to be you respected your elders because they had successfully survived a long time, and that was hard so they must be doing something right. This is simply no longer true, the vast majority of people get to be old for quite a while. Survival no longer equals competence or ability in any particular way.
-
It used to be that you also respected your elders wisdom because they had seen many things in their lives and might have some insight. This was a lot more useful when the world changed extremely slowly with the living experience/technology/society/etc the children/grandchildren of the elder being fairly similar to the experience of the elder. That experience was basically all that existed for research and was extremely relevant. Today we’re dealing with Boomers who remember how to use a slide rule in a world that just saw the wide release of generative AI models. Their advice on almost any subject is hopelessly out of date, far less factually accurate than a google search, and often deeply out of touch with reality especially on a financial level.
-
They’re the first generation in quite a while to fail to leave their kids a better life than the one they had. This despite the technology progressing quite a bit. This was a purely political failure that 100% came down to the Boomers buying corporate propaganda wholesale. I have no idea how the grandchildren of the people who finished the union wars managed to believe in capitalism to such a deep degree but it definitely gave the rest of us a deep hole to dig out of. Putting someone in a deep hole and then crying that they don’t respect you is not a winning strategy for getting them to respect you. Especially not when while you’re trying to get out of that hole they keep digging it deeper telling you that everything will be fine if you also keep digging the hole.
So yeah that whole ‘respect your elders’ thing is probably done in this culture. Well deserved IMO. When I’m old I hope people respect me, but not if I’m a fucking moron. I really hope that doesn’t happen it really scares me.
1 Like
I can’t believe a rando gas station had a worker, an assistant manager, and a manager all at the same time.
The manager was on the phone. Told the asst manager to refund.
I was elected to lead, not to read.
2 Likes
I’m also 1/2 but the one loss required some very technical explaining to fight the vendor’s story and it was for $20 and as much as my rage fueled me to start putting together a top notch presentation by the end of it it just wasn’t worth it and I never finished. I’m pretty sure a picture of the closed car wash would’ve been all you needed.
You can dispute a partial charge. My one win was after my local Chipotle ran out of guac for the 3rd time and just gave me my mobile order without it. At the time the app had no customer support, not even a contact email, I wasn’t going to call the local manager over $3 and I certainly wasn’t going to drive back to the store. The charge back allowed me to ask for just the $3 back.
1 Like
On the other hand they have all the money, so we often have to pretend to respect them as a result.
I’m rich enough to tell them to fuck off at this point.