$7,253 beer at Irish Fest a wee bit too much
At the school where Melissa Miller teaches, she has picked up a playful new nickname: the $7,000 beer girl.
That’s because she was accidentally charged that much — $7,253 to be exact — for one beer at Milwaukee Irish Fest in August, and the resulting mess on her credit card has yet to be cleaned up two months later.
Her statement now shows an excess credit in their favor from Irish Fest for $7,253, which is just as wrong, and which she and her husband, Hugh, are struggling to return to the festival.
“I feel kind of silly that I keep calling them and trying to give back their money to them,” Melissa said.
Hugh has tried, too. But it appears they’re up against a leprechaun in the gears.
“Every time I call, I just say, ‘Hi, I’m the guy with the $7,000 beer.’ I don’t know if I’m on speed dial now or what,” he said.
This all started Friday evening, Aug. 18. Melissa and Hugh, 20-somethings who live in Wauwatosa, were enjoying Irish Fest on the lakefront with other family members.
Melissa ordered a Blue Moon Belgian White for $7. She handed her Visa card to the friendly volunteer wearing flashing green glasses. Somehow that person entered a number 1,000 times the beer’s actual price.
A supervisor came over to try to fix the problem. Then two other workers showed up to help. Finally, it appeared they were successful.
“They’re like, ‘OK, we accidentally charged you this amount for your beer. Here’s the voided receipt. You can have your beer for free since you waited so long,’ ” Melissa said.
So no big deal, right? Later, the Millers looked at their credit card statement and saw it still showed they owed $7,253 — such an odd number — and that two additional attempts by the beer stand volunteer to charge that amount were rejected. That’s good, otherwise the bill would be in the $21,000 neighborhood for one beer.
The couple called the credit card company and were told to take it up with Irish Fest, which they did. Certainly the $7,253 charge would be voided, they were assured.
“Unfortunately, they refunded us the three separate charges, so it was $21,000 total. So then we had a $14,000 credit,” Hugh said, rounding off the numbers.
Again the festival tried to help but was only able to make half of the bogus credit go away. So now the Millers are back to the $7,253 figure they started with, but as a credit and not a charge.
“That was a little bit better situation,” said Hugh, who works as an engineer.
Melissa appreciates that her credit card was smart enough to reject the second and third attempts at the fest that night. “But I was like, you still let that $7,000 beer through? I thought that was funny.”
Irish Fest didn’t want to delve into the nuts and bolts of the error with me. In a statement, interim Executive Director Catherine Ward said, “The credit card transaction in question was a mistake and we accept full responsibility for the error that occurred. We have apologized to our guest and have been proactively working with her and the credit card transaction company to resolve the situation as quickly and accurately as possible.”
It’s too late for quickness, but accuracy would be nice.
Hugh’s mother, Lorraine Miller, jokingly suggested one solution, “Maybe they should just leave the situation be, and we’ll all drink at Irish Fest for free for the rest of our days.”
That could redefine the luck o’ the Irish.