I generally use a personal check to pay at Wal-Mart without any trouble. Otherwise I pay in cash—I don’t think I have ever used a credit card there, and definitely never a debit card.
“I generally use a personal check to pay at Wal-Mart without any trouble.”
Many of the Walmart stores began to use the new EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) policy at least six years ago in 2007-2008. The customer is asked to fill out an agreement form, sometimes misleadingly described a survey form. The customer must agree to being charged a fee for a bounced check. One store said the fee was about $25, but other customers have described NSF (Non-Sufficient Funds) fees of $39-$49. The customer is issued a PIN (Personal Identification Number) to be used for these EFT transactions. The personal check is run through the cash register, stamped with a void imprint on the check, and returned to the customer along with the cash register receipt.
This assumes of course there were sufficient funds available in the checking account to fulfill the immediate electronic funds transfer out of the customer’s checking account. In other words, the transaction results in an immediate electronic debit of the funds in the account in a manner similar to using a debit card.
One of the troubles with an EFT transaction like this are the occasions when something goes wrong. There have often been complaints about cashiers debiting the checking account two or more times for the same transaction. There are complaints about EFT and debit card transactions resulting in the funds in a checking account being blocked for a period of time because of valid and invalid transactons on the account. This blocking of the funds has led to NSF alerts and bounced check charges of $30-$40 even though the funds were not actually spent.
Worse still, at least one poster described how they worked at the Sheriff’s office and witnessed Walmart reporting a NSF check as a complaint to the police without trying to cash a check a second time or first contacting the customer.
Bottomline, even scrupulously honest people can find themselves the victim of unanticipated circumstances and potential law enforcement encounters where transactions have been made against your checking account balance without your prior knowledge that result in a NSF transaction despite actually having sufficinet funds.
Are there still some Walmart stores that have not yet adopted this EFT check payment policy? I don’t know. I talked to three Walmart stores before writing this post, and their customer service representatives did not know of any Walmart stores that had not yet implemented this EFT policy. Their stores use the EFT check policy. Perhaps you are lucky to use a Walmart that is not using EFT check transactions?
Blogs are reporting there are many elders who are still using checks at Walmart but do not yet realize or understand they were signed up to use these EFT transactions.