Macy's and your $2.00

I thought it might be helpful if I provided a visual to assist in explaining the new "Initial Interest Charges" which are included as a line item on your Macy's account statement in the Account Summary section of the bill.

                                                 Account Summary                                   

Balance of last Statement                                                  0.00

   Payments                                                                         0.00

   New Transactions this statement                                     96.30

Interest Charges                                                             +2.00

    New Balance                                                                   98.30

 Minimum due                                                                   5.00

This account is not past due, it is current, and the balance is 96.30 which is due in 30 days. Upon receiving this bill I immediately called Macy's customer service to ask some questions and point out a few things:

• The explanation of the 2.00 interest charge is strategically placed at the bottom of the account summary section under the PRIVACY POLICY information, in a smaller font, not bolded, and not made to stand out for easy reference.
• The explanation reads: To avoid initial Interest Charge, if you pay your New Purchase Balance of $96.30 by Jan 28, 2010, your Initial Interest Charge of $2.00 on your Revolving Account will be refunded on your next statement.  Which means that you do not owe nor are you required to pay this $2.00 as long as you pay the bill on or before the due date.  Do you think they could have simply printed, "This $2.00 is not due or payable to Macy's unless you pay this bill after the due date"?  Additonally, this information should be printed right next to this NEW $2.00 Initial Interest Charge.  Yes, I know it would cause Macy's to have to redesign the layout of their statement, which is what they chose not to do.  Statement layouts are pretty much done digitally these days and I doubt that it would have taken much effort to move a few things around but oh, they were probably not thinking about effort, just the cost of the effort.   
• How many people do you think will pay Macy's the $2.00 not realizing they do not owe this money?  Now let's take this a step further.  Macy's will accept this $2.00 from you and millions of other customers, deposit the monies into their investment accounts and earn interest off of this money for 30 days before they refund it back to your account.  And remember you will only be refunded if the account was paid on time.  If the account is paid late, Macy's will keep your $2.00 and charge you with additional interest accrued on the overdue balance of the account.
• It was further explained to me by Macy's customer service the following:  If the account was paid late and the $2.00 Initial Interest Charge was applied, as a result of the Minimum INTEREST CHARGE of $2.00 being applied to your Revolving account, the actual ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE charged on the account is 79.20%, way up from the already obscene 24.50%.
• If you find this confusing, can you imagine how this is affecting the senior citizen population?
• Lastly the customer service representative said they are overwhelmed with phone calls about the NEW $2.00 change to the account transactions.  Hmmm......... wonder why?