If you have been to the Round-Up Saloon & Dance Hall recently within the last couple of weeks and checked your bank statement today, chances are that woke up to a shock! Today on it’s Facebook page, the famously known Dallas based business announced to its customers that due to an error on from their credit card processing company, customers were seeing new activity to their credit/debit cards not there before.
Round-Up has been in the business of serving customers for many, many years and stands as a place of openness to whomever comes to have a drink. It is located at the heart of the Oaklawn District of Dallas, TX. The bar caters to the gay community mostly along with its straight customers that may occasionally attend for a night out with friends or by themselves. Most people call the country couture spot a “place to go to get away from reality.”
The following statement what was told to customers today:
Dear Round-Up Customer,
If you have used a Credit or Debit Card at the Round-Up between March 14th and April 8th, your charges were not processed at that time. Our Micros/CC Processing Company failed to process the charges until April 9th, 2013. The new charges you may be seeing on your statements are actually from the March 14th thru April 8th purchases.
Please examine the dates of your charges closely to confirm that they are in fact valid on the dates you signed for each purchase. You have not been double charged, these are not an error, just delayed billing over which we had no control.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused. If you are still in doubt about any charge, please feel free to contact our office to confirm purchases.
I myself have just fallen victim to this tragedy. From the period of time in question, I visited the establishment three times in which I totaled transactions to $157. When I checked my bank statement to see if something else had posted already, I discovered my account was overdrawn $191. Immediately, I contacted my bank to find out what had happened to my account and for what reason. Right now, it is being investigated.
Further information surfaced that Round-Up had no clue that its customers had experienced this problem until today when the third party company decided to process the transactions a second time. Initially when a card is swiped for payment for drinks ordered or a tab owed, the card is debited for the amount at that exact time. The bar claims that the charges were not processed the first time but if they were (as I can prove mine) and the money returned, doesn’t that void the transaction?
It also begs the question: “How does a business not notice this occurred?” One commenter on the Facebook post indicted that this activity was nearly a month old. Another person who responded stated that this type of incident has happened before to patrons. Whether that is true or not remains unknown but if it has, why has it not been fixed?
The bottom line is that this slip up has surely caused many customers to either go negative in their accounts. Money tied up for other bills and expenses is now gone leaving people to figure out how to compensate on their own. I for one am one of them but I wonder just how many others there are with the same problem. With that said, I am also curious as to how the bar is going to take care of this. Personally, I feel that these transactions should be forgiven. If they came out once, the money returned/reapplied to the person’s account and now out a second time, doesn’t that go against Payment Card Industry (PCI) Laws? Who knows!
What do you think?