We’ve got a credit account at Sears, opened long ago to get a discount on some forgotten appliance purchase. Since the account was opened, a series of Sears-branded MasterCards that came with it were unceremoniously cut up to avoid temptation and fraud exposure.

Last year, we had to buy a new refrigerator, and this year its warranty ran out. When Sears came calling to renew the warranty, I decided it sounded like a good deal, especially given the low price they offered. To make things easy, I just had the sales rep put the charge on the Sears account. All was well and good until the first bill came.

Pretty much all our bills are paid online now. It saves on postage, and it’s often possible to schedule automatic payments from the checking account. So we sat on the bill for a couple of weeks instead of sending a check back through the mail, assuming that we’d just pay it online in our normal end-of-month spasm of bill payment. A few days before it was due, we found that you’re required to have an activated charge card in order to make an online payment. Never mind the fact that you can rack up charges without it; you gotta have it to pay Sears. And our cards were neither activated nor extant.

There wasn’t enough time to put a check in the mail before the due date, so I trundled off to our local Sears, bill in hand, to pay at a till. There I was informed that you couldn’t pay down your account at a register, thanks to a month-old policy that forbade it. The credit account office was closed (this being at about 6:15 p.m. on a Friday), and wouldn’t be open again until Monday, a day after the due date. The folks at the store then suggested I go home and attempt to pay over the phone. I did so, but touch-tone electronic checking transactions required a service fee of about $13. After sniffing through their phone tree, I found a human, who held fast to the requirement to charge a service fee.

Since the fee was more than the penalties for late payment, I just ordered a replacement card, planning to pay online this month. Then I waited for the card to arrive. Then I waited some more. Finally, the thing arrived, and we activated it. Unfortunately, that’s not enough; online payment of your account is not available until you specifically enable that feature. Once you request it, it takes Sears six business days to “process” the request. So now we’re on a second month of flat-out not having paid a dime on our balance.

While I admit our initial assumptions were bad, and take responsibility for the bill and penalties, the whole process is pretty ridiculous, and seems designed to generate fees. I mean, really, $13 to pay over the phone even if no human is involved? Discontinuation of paying your credit account at the till? My head is still spinning at the requirement of six business days to process a request to allow online payment. And why require an activated credit card to pay online, when I have at my disposal a full set of account information on my paper bill? Sears is basically making tier zero painful for customers. They have deliberately set up roadblocks for consumers attempting to pay them.

What kind of morons and/or monsters would set up a system that actually made it difficult to take money from people?