Ado guys, wondering how many of you (specifically in the UK) have noticed this:

A lot of the time when I'm at work and take a Lloyds TSB card, specifically the one with the Olympic 2012 design, I have to do a security check on it. This involves ringing people up at whatever passes for their security centre, speak to some foreign person (sounds racist but sometimes I have to ask these people to repeat themselves 3 times before I finally understand what they've said,) getting an authorisation code, and then the machine in my shop declining the card anyway.

Worse, as the customer has put their pin number in by the time this happens, Lloyds take it as authorisation to spend the money, even though we haven't taken any money. So where does the money end up? Apparently, if there's no authorisation code, the money will be returned within three days, but from what one of my customers was telling me after this had happened to him for the second time within a week or so, the Lloyds customer service guys deny any responsibility for the money once the customer has put their pin number in.

At first I thought it was just my shop but no; the guy told me that this had happened to him in another shop as well. And yesterday, as I was walking through Dudley Town Centre, I heard a guy cursing into his mobile phone to what was presumably the customer service team from his bank because money hadn't cleared or something. It was difficult to say exactly what had gone wrong because the rather colourful mixture of facts, insults and threats that made up his side of the discussion made the whole thing rather hard to follow. But he was waving around this exact same card. So this is happening to a few people...

I know John and Moll have had problems with this bank in the past, so has anybody else experienced this? And dare I ask, does anyone know what the hell is going on?

matt486

Hi Matt,hope alls good

As a fellow retailer (btw,has your instore music played any Slade or Roy Wood yet?You know its coming!) I think part of the problem is that because there are different types of chip and pin machines as opposed to one standard type, some machines just have an allergy to some cards...ours don't like Nationwide cards for some reason.

It must be a known/recognised thing because a few Saturdays ago our IT department informed us with much pride that they'd fixed the Nationwide glitch...and fix it they had. Only problem was that we then couldn't take any others, so they settled for the lesser of two evils and put the glitch back in!

Be careful what you wish for on the call centre front by the way. When a particular mobile network who are named after a number between two and four first started up they had all their call centres in India and this prompted loads of complaints so they opened one up in the UK. Where did they choose ? Glasgow of all places! It was like talking to a bad episode of Taggart.

The joys of retail eh?

Ado Ian, thanks for that!

Yeah I heard about the different chip and pin things, good heavens to betsy, you'd think they could sort themselves out.

No Slade or Roy Wood yet, but I'm loving The New Divide by Linkin Park which has featured on our most recent CD!

see you soon

matt

Linkin' Park ? We don't get anything as exciting as that! My favourite on ours at the moment is 'Hips Don't Lie' by Shakira...nothing to do with the song, and everything to do with the fact that it comes on at 5:28pm and is the signal to cash up!

PLEASE!! not Slade and Roy Wood!!!!