Do we have a Jordan’s PowerCharge account, or don’t we?

My wife and I recently visited Jordan’s Furniture to look at mattresses.  While we’ve had our problems with Jordan’s in the past, Mattresses are definitely a commodity item, the Jordan’s “sleep techs” really do seem to know what they’re talking about, and their mattress prices are quite reasonable.

We have a Jordan’s PowerCharge account which we opened several years ago, and we had planned on using it to buy a mattress as well, to get the zero-interest financing.  While we were at the store, we asked their office to check if the account was still active, and they said it was closed after two years of inactivity and we’d have to reapply for a new account.

We reapplied at the kiosk in the store, and we were turned down, because our debt to income ratio is supposedly too high.  This is because we recently replaced our Chase credit card with one from Citizens Bank, and the new card has a six-month zero-interest promotion on it, so we’ve been carrying a high balance on that account which we will pay off completely in about a month but in the meantime makes our credit score look not-so-good.  D’oh!

When we found out why we were turned down, we shrugged our shoulders and said oh well, that’s life, so much for zero-interest financing on the mattress.  Then we made the arrangements I recently wrote about for our sofa to be replaced.

It took several days for the customer service department at the Jordan’s corporate headquarters to enter all the necessary credits for the sofa into their billing system.  They finished a few days before our second mattress-shopping visit to the store, so while we were there, I stopped by the office again to pay the sales tax (see the other article for details) so the sofa could be shipped.

To my surprise, they informed me that the sales tax had already been paid.  I told them that was rather odd, since I certainly hadn’t paid it, and they said, “It says here that it was paid for with a PowerCharge account.  Do you have a PowerCharge account?”  So I told them that as far as we knew, no, we did not have a PowerCharge account, because our old account was closed and our new one was denied.

It turned out that when Jordan’s refunded the cost of our sofa so we could order a replacement, the refund went back onto the account which had originally been used to pay for it, i.e., our old PowerCharge account.  And when the refund was pushed back onto the old, closed PowerCharge account, the account was automatically reopened, even though HSBC, the bank that underwrites PowerCharge accounts, had just rejected us for a new account.  Then, when our replacement sofa order was finalized by the folks at the Jordan’s corporate HQ, the charge for the sales tax was paid by our now reopened PowerCharge account automatically.

We had a PowerCharge account.  Then we didn’t.  And now, apparently, we do again.  But do we really?  When we go to buy our mattress in a couple of weeks, will they accept the replacement PowerCharge card that I just ordered (because I cut up the old one when they told us the account was closed)?  We’ll just have to wait and see.