The Consumer Complaints Blog

My story is a simple one. I went to my local branch of the TD/Canada Trust where I have banked for eight years and my husband for over twenty years. I went to make a deposit of a check that I received from the United States for income from a small farm I hold jointly with my siblings. I receive this income once a year. I have been getting this check for the past eight years. The first year I lived in Canada, the check I received was drawn from our small business account in the US and since I had just recently got married and moved to Canada and opened an account with what was then Canada Trust, this check was held for 30 days. Frustrating, but not totally unexpected either.

At that time I discussed with the bank how I could best handle this money transaction for the following years in order to avoid a hold being placed on the money. The bank recommended I get the money sent to me in the form of a bank check drawn from the USbank where our farm account was held. So that’s what I did. No more problems with holds being placed on the check for the next six years.

Then suddenly this year, January2006, when I stop in at my bank to deposit my check, I get questioned. Now in all fairness, I was also questioned last year about the check, what it was for, where it came from etc., but when I explained the situation, had the teller go back into my account and showed them where I had received a similar payment the previous year, the check was deposited, no questions. So I did the same this year. But the teller said she needed to run it past her manager. When she came back out, she told me the best they could offer me was a five day hold on the check since there was not a “code” attached to the deposit last year which showed it was made yearly. Now this hold was of course for five “business” days meaning that the current day (Thursday) didn’t count so I wouldn’t be able to access the money until the following Friday. I was upset. I informed the teller that I’ve banked with TD/Canada Trust for eight years and my husband for over twenty. We have our mortgage through this bank. I even asked for the manager to come over to speak with me. Well when the manager came over, he really didn’t look old enough to even be working, let alone be in a management position. He took one look at the check, NEVER made eye contact with me and said, “Nope, that’s the best we can do.” and walked away. I was livid! I told the teller I would take my check and my business elsewhere and walked out the door.

Well of course, the threat of me taking my business elsewhere did nothing for them. I’m sure they were secretly applauding that it was one less paltry account for them to deal with, but it felt good for the whole of the five seconds it took me to walk out the doors of the bank. So after a small rant with my husband, I told him to take the check back into the bank and deposit it into my account, as I knew taking it to another bank would not be a plausible solution. I knew I would not be able to get my husband to follow me in my trek to find a new bank to do business with. So the check was deposited with the five day hold. My husband later told me that another teller had come over and told him that we were lucky with just a five day hold as most of the time it was a thirty day hold. Well….let’s just say it was a good thing my husband didn’t tell me this until a LONG time after.

Now my story doesn’t end here. An hour or so after returning from the bank, I calmed down enough to have a rational thought. I decided I was not going to allow the bank to treat a loyal customer this way. So after digging and searching on the internet, I found the phone number to call and lodge a complaint with TD/Canada Trust. The gentlemen I got when I finally was connected to a live person had obviously been well trained in the art of diplomacy, as he had just the right amount of care and concern without giving away anything he could be held accountable for later. He said he would take my information down and someone would get back to me….. Now are you ready for this??? Wait…it’s a good one!! Someone would get back to me in three to five business days!! Well I told the guy that wouldn’t solve my problem of not being able to get my money now would it! But in his best well-trained concerned voice, he thought they might get back to me the next day if they weren’t busy. (Good comeback don’t you think to keep the angry lady appeased?)

Well I ended by telling him all over again what I thought of TD/Canada Trust and their customer service. I summed it up at the end by saying. If going through my banking history of the past few years plus the long history that my husband has had with this bank, isn’t a clue that we have never committed bank fraud or theft during this time, the likelihood that my New Year’s resolution for 2006 is to turn to a life of crime, show up at my bank with a bogus fraudulent US bank check….is pretty remote.

I’m still waiting to receive the call from someone about my complaint. I don’t hold out much hope that it will happen before the hold runs out on my money. But I do know that I’m going to make a comment to them about how busy their complaint department must be if it takes three to five business days to get back to me about my small complaint…ha! I might also discuss with them about how TD/Canada Trust gets to use “my money” during these five days of the hold. (But that’s another topic for another day.) And then I will also share with them what I’m going to do for TD/Canada Trust in the future. I’m going to make sure I tell anyone and everyone about my experience at TD/Canada Trust. I’m going to write about it as often as I can, and maybe….just maybe with my small ripple in this big pond, I can make a difference for all of us who have been loyal bank customers for many years and for any new customers that might be thinking of banking at TD/Canada Trust.

Lynnette J. Thorne
Calgary Alberta

Disclaimer
This article was submitted by one of our readers. Penciltrick cannot make any claims as to its authenticity but the article was accepted on a good faith belief that it is an accurate and truthful account of the events listed.

Here are a couple of incidents that happened about 3 years ago, but it pretty much turned me off of eating pizza for a long time. At least pizza that is not made at home.

I had injured my foot somehow. The method is not really important and I can’t quite remember anyway. The important thing is that I could only walk about as quickly as a turtle with a broken leg.

My wife and I were making our way home when we decided that we were both really hungry. Not having anything in the fridge we decided we’d stop and grab a pizza on the way home.

We were leaving the subway and I tell her to go ahead and get the pizza because it would take me a while to make my way up the stairs. She nodded and made a beeline for Pizza Pizza.

As I was hobbling towards the store, a stocky little guy passed me. He was carrying one of those bags that keeps pizza warm on a delivery. Being in the parking lot, I figured he was coming back from delivering a pizza.

This Pizza Pizza is at Yonge and Sheppard, and the kitchen is pretty visible from the outside, so I watched him while I waited for my wife.

He walked through the back door, entered the kitchen, put the pizza warmer bag on the counter, and grabbed a hunk of pizza dough to start kneading it with his hands. Hands that probably handled money from the customer, groped his steering wheel while he drove, and no doubt did other things hands do while he was in the privacy of his car, alone.

A pinky coated in a film of snot…fingernails packed with dandruff…his right palm speckled with a spray of mucus from a sneeze…I have no proof and I can only imagine. But it was enough for me.

I opened the side door, situated near the counter where my wife stood while she waited to be served. “Let’s go.” I barked, and without hesitation but puzzled, she left the store (I explained to her later why I acted that way.)

After vowing never to go to Pizza Pizza, we decided to try Pizzaville, also at Yonge and Sheppard. This was a few weeks later, at night.

The following is my wife’s account:

I order a medium pizza and chicken wings.

After taking my money and preparing the order, the cook shoves it in the oven to heat it. Seeing that this would take a while, he sits down to wait. I sit facing away from the kitchen and him, but I watch him in the reflection of the window. He’s far more interesting than the lifeless street outside.

It is a slow night, so he begins to work on some paperwork. Nothing wrong with that, right? He jots a few things down here and there, adds some numbers, then shoves an index finger in his ear to itch it.

Okay. that’s gross, but I’ll let it go. After all, he doesn’t know that I’m watching him, and everyone does it, right?

But he really gets into it.. He switches his pen to the other hand and shoves the other index finger in his ear. Then his pinky. He digs and pokes, twirls and picks, itches and scratches until finally, he’s satisfied. A sigh of relief quietly passes his lips.

Oh….just a second. His head is itchy now. The same hand that itched his ear now goes up to his head.

With a frenetic scratch, he looks at his watch and sees that it’s time to take my order out of the oven.

And he doesn’t even wash his hands. Just like the Pizza Pizza guy.

My wife is ashamed that she still took the pizza and chicken wings, despite watching all of this. She claims that he never actually touched the food with his hands, using utensils to put it in their boxes. But her claim doesn’t comfort me, and we haven’t gone back.

Yes, these two stories aren’t that bad you may think. I agree.

I’m not naive enough to believe food is always prepared in sanitary conditions. I know that my standards and expectations are set far too high for the norm. I know that the factory or restaurant environment is not as clean as it should be. But it’s the standards of staff, and their work ethic, that disgusts me.

Wash your hands if you’re going to be touching my food, especially if they’ve been picking your ass!

I was going to write an article on the Canadian banking system today. Or post an update to the false advertising article I did earlier, but I had to spend half my day trying to fix a problem with my crap Windows computer.

Today, it did some kind of automatic update which had the computer restart involuntarily. Okay? That was pretty bad. Good thing the work was saved. After restarting, I couldn’t get Outlook to launch at all. The computer froze and then restarted every time I tried to launch Outlook. Aaaaaaa!

Funny, Firefox works okay. Adaware seems to run. I wonder why this is happening? Oh I think I know. It’s another useless Microsoft update that just makes things worse. After half a day of fighting with it, enough was enough. I decided to do away with all non-essential Microsoft applications on the machine.

Extremely annoying, but the experience gave me the idea for writing this article.

A quick review of non-Microsoft applications that can be used to accomplish the exact same tasks as their commercial counterparts. You could of course do something radical like switch to a Mac; but we know that it is not always practical to change operating systems. Even Unix is not quite at the level a basic user would be comfortable with. Besides, Macs have their own set of problems and Apple is just a touch better than Microsoft at dealing with a complaint when things go wrong.

Let’s start with the web

You can do all your browsing with Firefox from Mozilla. It’s free. It’s open source and it works. For most things, you won’t ever need to launch Internet Explorer again. Did I mention that it’s more secure as well? The main problem is that web developers still have their heads jammed too far up Microsoft’s ass to make things cross browser compatible. But I rarely have any problems with Firefox so give it a try.

Need to check e-mail?

I just installed Thunderbird from Mozilla. I didn’t know about this ’til I was forced to find an alternative for Outlook today. I installed it and it is as good as (dare I say better than?) the mail program on my Mac. And I can tell you that it’s way better than Outlook. It has a good junk mail filter and is supposed to be more secure than Outlook. Oh yeah, it didn’t crash my system when running today. That was a huge bonus.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

Shouldn’t we be able to expect applications to run as kind of the minimum these days?

What about Office applications, you say?

Yes, yes. We all need word processors and slideshows and all that other good stuff. Thankfully, there is a free program for that as well. Yes, I did say free. OpenOffice has been around for a while. It’s a less bloated, open source alternative to the Office suite. I noticed they just released version 2.0 so it’s even more developed than when I first started using it. And it imports and exports to MS Office for your friends that don’t quite “get it” yet. Or at least that’s what you’ll be thinking when you see them paying for things they could get for free.

http://www.openoffice.org/

The OpenOffice Suite 2 comes with six applications. I don’t really know how they all work since I mainly use the word processor but here goes:

Write: http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html
A fully equipped word processor. Very nice and stable. Much faster than Word.

Calc: http://www.openoffice.org/product/calc.html
A spreadsheet program.

Impress: http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html
This seems to be like PowerPoint but probably better. I have no experience with this so please let me know what you think if you’re currently using it.

Draw: http://www.openoffice.org/product/draw.html
Used for drawings and diagrams. Again, no experience with this.

Base: http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html
SQL database tool.

Math: http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html
Mathematics equation editor.

Admittedly, for some users of Windows, these tools may not be exactly what they want. But for about 95% of people out there, these tools can pretty much take care of anything they need to do with their computer. Before shelling out money for software, (or pirating) try these out. They’re stable, fast, reliable, and you can’t beat the price.

The point of all this being that you do not need to put up with junk. As a consumer, it’s your duty to send a message and stop putting up with garbage. The only message corporations understand is the one coming from their bottom line. You can try screaming and protesting and whining. But if you want to change things, hit corporations where it hurts. Right in the dollar signs.
Thanks for reading and if you like these tools, spread the word.

For this article I’d like to talk about SickKids Hospital in downtown Toronto, Canada.

The story begins with a call from my sister in law. My nephew hurt his arm and we needed to take him to the doctor because she couldn’t tell what was wrong with him. After an annoying trip to his incompetent doctor, we end up at Sick Kids Hospital. (I once had a guy on the street ask me why it’s not just called Kids Hospital since hospitals are automatically presumed to be for sick people.)

The Hospital For Sick Children, or SickKids as it is known, “is one of the largest paediatric academic health science centres in the world, with an international reputation for excellence in health care, research, and teaching.” That’s a direct quote from their web site.

Now don’t get me wrong. This is not an assault on the hospital or its abilities. In Toronto and around the world, they really do have a superb reputation for excellence. Something not all hospitals in the Canadian system can claim, and I’m speaking from first hand experience. I once had to sit in the emergency room for over three hours with an exposed, gashed open knee before anyone looked at it. Of course this wasn’t as bad as the kid next to me who’s wheelchair was parked in a pool of his own blood. But I digress.

So we’ve established that SickKids Hospital is famed for its excellent doctors and the good work that they do, including teaching.

My nephew, by the way, was taken care of by a doctor who found that his arm was just dislocated. A common condition in young children apparently. He popped it back in in a second flat.

While we were waiting for the doctor, I had a chance to look around. This is the part I don’t get. In North America, we have a growing problem with obesity and heart disease and you name it. The culprit of which is overeating and a fast food culture. So why then does one of the world’s best hospitals for children allow Burger King onto their premises? Is this not a conflicting message to send to children and people in general?

Now, I’m not a granola munching vegetarian hippy or anything, but I am against hypocrisy and I do hate fast food. Not because I don’t eat meat. In fact, there is nothing I love more than a good charcoal barbecue dripping with flesh. (I think I’m getting hungry.)

No, the reason I hate fast food is because it’s insulting to consumers and humanity as a whole. I can barely even call it food to be honest. It’s a pathetic example of minimum standards for low quality human consumption, masked with flavour enhancers and cleverly marketed with lies and propaganda. Not to mention how it’s prepared. This truly is the lowest form of food created solely for profit. The worst part is how people keep eating it and even defend it if you point it out.

But the real problem is that this famous hospital has no problem sending this mixed message to children and parents. What are we as consumers supposed to think? Doctors are telling us that we should avoid this crap but the hospital seems to think it’s okay. Which one is it?

I went back a different day and shot some photos.

This one is a shot of the sign from the street. The hospital wants to make sure you know what’s inside for you to eat.

They also want to make sure that on the way to that cardiac scan, you can grab something at Burger King.

This is inside the hospital. Burger King seems to be closed on Sunday. Guess Sundays aren’t profitable enough.

What about this question of profitability? Would these companies be in the hospitals if they weren’t turning a profit? Hell no! So why then does this hospital send out a yearly campaign asking people to donate money? Other hospitals in the city use their facilities to make money that goes towards the hospital. Why is The Hospital for Sick Children such a corporate whore?

All good questions that I’m sure some twisted individual at the hospital can give a BS answer to when they could do a much better job of running their facilities. At the very least, stop sending out mixed messages.

As always, thank you for reading.

Today I thought we’d tackle the issue of false advertising. Too often
we hear and see things in print or television that are just not true.
Take this advertisement from Rogers for example.

The advertisement in question is proudly hanging in their store windows, most
probably part of their other integrated efforts, like print and direct
mail. In fact, they’re currently using it on the Rogers Video website
as I write this.

The sign states in big bold letters: “RETURN IT FAST FOR CASH”. It’s
almost screaming it at you and has a tacky set of arrows to go with
it for dramatic emphasis.

So now it’s time to find out what they mean. Will they actually give
me back some money? That would be cool…

Direct quote: “Return FAST-BACK BAYBACK MOVIES by 12 NOON the next
day and GET $1 OFF your next movie rental.”

Hold on! Wait a minute. Did they just say I’ll get $1 off my next
movie rental? That doesn’t sound like cash to me. It sounds more like
credit. In-store credit and a scam to have me come back for more
movies. Is it? I have to look this up to get the dictionary
definition. I have to make sure I am not misunderstanding the word “cash”.

Let’s see now, here is the official definition of the word.

cash
noun
. money in coins or notes, as distinct from checks, money orders, or
credit.
. money in any form, esp. that which is immediately available.

Note the part that says “as distinct from credit”.

So let’s apply a test. I go to the drug store next door.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes?”

“I took back some movies to Rogers the other day. They gave me $3 off
my next rental. Can I use that to buy anything here?”

Deadpan face. “No.”

Aha! So it is not money. I can’t spend it and it is not immediately
available is it?

How is it possible for this to happen? Could it be that the people in the
Roger’s marketing department are illiterate? That can’t be right or
they wouldn’t have been able to write the resume they used to get the
job. Or is it possible that they thought the word CASH in huge
letters would grab people’s attention more than IN-STORE CREDIT? Hmm…

The point of all of this being this. Is this false advertising? It is
clearly saying things that are not true. You will not even come close
to seeing cash for returning a video fast. So why are companies
allowed to mislead people this way? All I can do is ask and hope that
people pay attention and think.

As always, thank you for reading.