debit card users, online banking & a plea for patience

debit card users/ online bankers.. please, please, please understand that while you can look at your accounts immediately, we (restaurants) can not process cards immediately. we send one batch a day, usually after midnight. mistakes often happen when servers are busy. four people at a table may split a check and they may pay with 4 different cards. a server might accidentally swipe one card twice, realize his mistake, then swipe the right card.
at the end of the night, you are only charged for the transaction that the server accepted. the big problem is that if a debit card is swiped, mistakenly twice, the bank will hold those funds for 3-5 days, even though the transaction wasn't accepted. it will show as 'pending'... this is bank policy and the restaurant has no control over that.
last friday night, i had a server mistakenly swipe two cards at the same table. both people called me to complain, one 15 minutes after they left, the other an hour after they left ( and she had talked to her friend and had already gotten my explanation). we had not even sent in our batch yet, so theoretically, they had not been charged for anything yet, but their bank was holding their funds.
with credit card compliance laws, we can't even store your card number in our point of sale systems anymore.
i try to convey to my servers that a transaction with a debit card is like making change for a $100.00 bill. pay very close attention to what you are doing. occassionally they will make mistakes, but rarely are they intentional. if the were intentional, that person will not be working for me any longer.
thanks, andrew

I've had to talk my wife off the ledge a few times over things like this. She loves watching our account online and gets jumpy every time she sees a transaction go through like this. I always tell her to keep an eye on it for a couple days and it will clear itself up.

I've had to talk my wife off the ledge a few times over things like this. She loves watching our account online and gets jumpy every time she sees a transaction go through like this. I always tell her to keep an eye on it for a couple days and it will clear itself up.

I've never had a restaurant make an honest mistake that wasn't cleared up in very short order (although I HAVE had a dishonest server make off with my credit card number...but that's another story). My "horror" story involves the time I used my debit card when renting a car. Turns out the "hold" this particular company put on my card exceeded the balance...when I tried to use the card of other purchases, all hell broke loose.

Financial institutions are NOT supposed to hold more than the final bill amount (as I remember from my dayz in banking). Now, rental car and hotel charges prove to be a bit of a sticky wicket, however, from what I remember, being about 10 or so years removed from Bank of America Operations, it is not supposed to be more than the anticipate rate (base + tax X days). It is bad form, both professionally and ethically to put a $1,000 hold on a card for a purchase that you only anticipate getting $300 on.