Curious Hair wrote:
Quote:
Another wonky feature of the Ventra system is that it was designed to suck up the hard-earned money of millions of less-fortunate Chicagoans into bank coffers. The transit cards can double as debit cards, you see, promoted as a boon for Chicago’s un- and under-banked. But dig the customer fees hidden in the 1,000-page contract the city signed with Cubic: $1.50 every time customers withdraw cash from an ATM, $2.95 every time they add money to their online debit account with a personal credit card, $2 for every call with a service representative and an “account research fee” of $10 an hour for further inquiries, $2 for a paper copy of their account information, and, if you decide you’ve had enough, a $6 “balance refund fee.” This all makes mincemeat of the pro-privatization argument that “the marketplace” is more transparent than a government bureaucracy.
sinicalypse called this in a thread that's since been deleted, about how it's a RushCard and stuff.
yeah dude, it's totally a rushcard, which in and of itself was called a cynical ploy to stick black people for $$$ using russell simmons' cred/brand as an "in" to "the community."
as i've said b4 (and i'll likely say again, sorry) the thing that pisses me off to no ends about the ventra card is how that it refuses to notify you when you're running low on transit fare. i would conjecture that they WANT YOU to get caught with your pants down aka getting on a bus/train and not having enough $$$ on the card, so you have to end up in some socially/uncomfortable situation where you either miss the next train or have to bug people on the bus for change (altho unless you have a total prick of a driver they usually just let you go) because you had no idea that you're out of $$$.... and to make the waters even more murky the ventra card is capable of randomly deciding to hold a negative balance of anywhere between -$0.25 to -$1.50 if you have $$$ on the card that isn't enough for a fare. but yeah, they do all of this because they want you to be shamed into using the option where you tie your ventra card to your bank-account/credit-card and have it auto-refill $50-100/whatever whenever it gets below a certain remaining-balance threshhold, lest you have to deal with the humiliation of being that guy who gets on a bus and your card's out of juice and you don't have a few singles on you so you're stuck in a pickle.
when i called up ventra to bitch about this they told me that they couldn't show us our remaining transit balance (you know, THE ONLY THING THAT THEY DEEMED IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO TELL YOU WHEN YOU USED THE OLD TRANSIT CARDS) because "there's a debit card on your ventra card" and they can't show the balance because of potential ne'er-do-wells seeing how much $$$ is on the card. so i was like "oh cool so if i throw $50 or something on the card and i'm short on cash i can use the card as a debit card to get a sandwich or something?" and they said "no, the transit card and the debit card are completely separate so the balances in each respective account don't affect each other" and i'm like "wait a minute, so if i threw a few paychecks on the debit card side of the ventra card and i've got like $2000 on it, you're telling me if i run out of transit balance it won't go and take the $$$ from the debit card? and i can't even set it up to recharge the transit card amount from the debit card balance?" --- nope. the debit card is COMPLETELY SEPARATE and cannot be used in any way shape or form with the transit balance (because they know the debit card is BS and therefore they want access to your bank-acct/credit-card)
so when i said "ok, so if the debit card is COMPLETELY SEPARATE from the transit card, then why the hell can't the display on the buses only show me my transit card balance? if you say they're completely different then the debit card shouldn't matter at all, but it was the reason you gave me for not being able to show me my transit balance" and that must have flummoxed them because after a ~3 second pause i got "i'll bring the issue up with my supervisor" which no doubt was a blowoff.
so yeah, outside of the whole thing where ventra wants you to have a card tied into your legit personal information so this way they can have a nice little database where they can see where/when any fully-registered-ventra-card has taken pubtrans (as it keeps records of which bus/train you took at what time and etc... you're able to look through your complete "transit history" on the ventra website) this whole ventra thing was basically a clever way to not just freely distribute a bunch of high-interest rushcards to millions of people, but furthermore you stick them with a $5 cost to get a new ventra card at the onset (and trust me, they'll mail you 50 free rushcards if you sign up for them). it's a brilliant little hustle/scheme, and if anyone's dumb enough to use the ventra/rushcard then they're going to make their $$$ off of microtransactions from every transaction you make with the card. hell, don't they even take something like 5% when you DEPOSIT money on the thing? yeah, predatory might be too nice of a word for this because predators often eat to survive and this isn't about survival as much as it is about bleeding as much $$$ from people as you can because you can. it's out-n-out extra greed.
sorry for the TLDR, but this is something i feel strongly about.
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Curious Hair wrote:
Les Grobstein's huge hog is proof that God has a sense of humor, isn't it?
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