Although, in the case of the Ontario Post Office, taking your credit card with you doesn’t do you much good.

Yesterday I went through the process of having them deliver some business flyers for me. I’d already went there before to get the instructions and the list of drops per residential area, so Michelle and I had everything counted out, bundled up, and ready to go. Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Not only was there a lot more paperwork to fill out, but, when I pulled out my Visa to pay for it all, I was told that I couldn’t pay for mail drops that way.

What was funny was that I was standing right in front of a cash register that had a Visa sticker on it (as well as signs for other credit cards and debit) and I pointed rather hopelessly at this. It turns out that they do accept credit cards for almost everything – but just not that. This reminds of me of Grand & Toy where, a few months ago, I tried to pay off a bill with my credit card but they “weren’t programmed” to accept it. (I could have paid that way at the time, but it had gone onto an expense account, and I was trying to clear the balance.) I had to go and get some cash from the bank. Same deal here.

It strikes me as very strange that any business that is set up to accept credit cards for most of their transactions would have some kind of artificial limitation in place for some specific transactions. Surely if somebody is offering to give you money, and you have the technical ability to accept it, you’d make use of that. Even if it’s something “funny” with the piece of software involved with the one transaction – you’d think you’d get on the horn to have it updated and/or put some kind of manual supplemental process in place to take it into account. Does it make any business sense for a company to turn down money? Especially money as represented by one of the most common transactional forms?