Maybe I Should Get It At Gimbel's

As many people know, last year, Macy's rebranded all of the various chains it had subsumed via the May and Federated mergers. It's hard to was nostalgic about the loss of Rich's and Hecht's and Strawbridge's, because frankly those chains were just vestigial remains of the grand old department stores that preceded them.

But that's not really what this post is about. I'd had a Hecht's credit card for some time, one that I barely used, but it occasionally would come in handy, particularly at Christmas time. One would have assumed that this card would have been replaced with a Macy's card after the rebranding. When I used the card for Christmas shopping, I was assured that a new one should be on its way.

Well, now it's June and I happened to see that old Hecht's card as I was doing some housework, so I thought it was time to follow-up on this missing replacement. I went to their website and found my way to the "contact us" page for credit card customer service. They have four options

• EMail Us
  "We ask you to log-in for your security and to expedite the handling of your questions"
  Ummm, WTF? "Log in"? I don't want to "log in" I want to send you an email.
  
  
• Text Chat
  OK, I tried that. Evidently that area of customer service was closed, so I received a pop-up asking me to enter the "skill" and "identifier". Again, WTF? Those are not fields that the customer should be seeing.
  
  
• Talk Live
  At first I couldn't figure out what was different about this in comparison to Text Chat, but then I noticed that it requires a microphone and speakers, so essentially it's a VOIP application. Good enough. I clicked on the link and got a security warning from my browser. The certificate they want me to accept expired in 2002. I hate to repeat myself, but WTF? A five year old security certificate does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling. I guess I should be impressed that the system has not balked at my using Firefox.
  
  
• Call Us
  I have to admit, I did try to call them on this topic once before. It was after I received the bill for my purchases last December. I'd got patched through to India, and while I have no general problem with outsourced call centers, I do require that the person on the phone speak relatively clear English. So I'd hung up. This time I went ahead and called. I got a bunch of recordings, then a bunch of clicks, and then hung up on. Nice. So I tried again, and finally got through to "Basil". He listened only about half the time, ignored some of my questions completely, and generally was not very helpful.
  

I think I might be getting a new Macy's card though. Which I probably should cut up into tiny pieces and send back to them.

Macy's Credit "Services" - you hereby receive the WORST CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE of the month award.