My wife bought me a $25 gift card from McDonalds for Christmas.
When I tried to use it the day after Christmas for a coffee they told me it had a $0 balance.
When I looked it up online, it activated on Dec 20th with $5 & was used up on the 23rd (My wife bought the card on the 24th)

I called their corporate office and the woman there just kept apologizing over and over and saying that since we didn’t keep the receipt there was nothing she could do. I probably was meaner then I should have been to the woman, but I asked her several times to stop apologizing, it was just making me mad, but she kept on and on. When I asked for a supervisor she told me that it was the corporate headquarters and there was no one above her (like they would let a supervisor answer the phone first). I was so mad I hung up and called back a couple of days later after I calmed down and found the credit card receipt. They promised they would speak to the store owner and get right back to me. Still haven’t heard anything.

Couldn’t they contact the store and see if the register was over $25 that day? or something? anything? How else could I have spent exactly $25 that day? Was there an Arch card issued at that time? I called the local store, twice and was told that the Arch Cards were handled by corporate, but at least she told me that she would try and check into it. I haven’t heard back from them either. We do have a credit card statement and we’ll see if they can help, but all I wanted was for McDonalds to look into it and get back to me.

This has been very disappointing and I’m sure my lack of business won’t mean much to McDonalds going forward, but comon, get your act together. This is 2013, you guys are tracking everything and negative social media can be a monster.

I did hear something from them today when I used the #McDStories hashtag on Twitter. Something that’s been called a huge marketing fail, but it may do some good for me, along with this post (or maybe not).

Update 1-18 – Spoke to Kim Musgrave with customer satisfaction. She apologized for taking so long to get to the bottom of this and said a new card is on the way. They saw where someone had tried to reload the card three times and it failed. I’m glad it seems to be settled, was just an error and not something nefarious, but I agree with Kim that this took way too long

Update 2-1 – Arch cards arrived along with a couple of extra freebees. Thanks to Kim, but still a long and very annoying process. I may give away the cards, not sure yet if I’m going back.