Story entered Friday, 08/25/2000

PROCESSING ERROR Shop at Walgreens on Aug. 16? Check bill By Sheryl Jean of Knight Ridder Newspapers

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Talk about inflation. Joany Cody was shocked to discover that Walgreens drugstore had charged her bank account almost $72 for several notepads, a pen, ice cream and a few other small items she picked up one day last week.

The St. Paul, Minn., resident had a hunch something was amiss, and she was right. The store had doubled her bill, along with the bills of thousands of others who used a credit card or debit card to buy items on Aug. 16 at more than 3,100 Walgreens stores nationwide.

The company acknowledged the error, blaming a processing fluke. Walgreens credited customer accounts last Sunday. It said it has no plans to notify customers of the glitch.

Customers' credit card or bank statements likely will show two Walgreens charges for the same amount and a credit for one of the amounts. However, the credit may not show up on the same statement as the charges.

Cody didn't discover her two trips to Walgreens stores in St. Paul on Aug. 16 had been so pricey until she checked her account balance Monday and found her math didn't match up with the bank's.

A closer look revealed that Walgreens purchases of $27.03 and $8.90 were subtracted twice from her account, bringing her bill to $71.86 instead of $35.93. She dug through her trash to find her receipts and spent a couple of hours dealing with her bank and store employees.

"I'm angry because it was a big runaround," she said. "If I hadn't found it, nobody would have ever said a word."

Walgreens would not disclose the amount it overcharged customers. However, an average Walgreens store generates $16,712 in sales each day. The snafu is blamed on a worker who was attempting to fix a computer problem and inadvertently re-sent the total amount of credit card charges for Aug. 16 to the Walgreens payment processor on Aug. 17, said Michael Polzin, a spokesman for the Illinois-based company. Software used by the processor picked up the error and the company alerted Walgreens.

Similar billing snafus have happened a couple of times in the past few years, Polzin said.

Polzin said he hasn't heard of many customer complaints, but that also may be because customers may not realize yet that they were double-billed. Customers should call their credit card company or bank to check if a Walgreens credit was made to their account, he said.

http://www.news-sentinel.com/ns/admin/daily/biz0.htm

-- Doris (reaper1@mindspring.com), August 26, 2000

Answers

Hey Doris

Was looking for that story and couldn't find it..

Thanks

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 26, 2000.