With a Menards store only four miles from our home, we frequently shop their for household items, grocery items, and any home building/remodeling/landscaping projects we do. A definite convenience, we thought, would be to have a Menards Big Card for our purchases. The cash back rebate they advertise, additional coupons that arrive with your statement, 0% benefits for large purchases. It seemed to be the way to go.

Unfortunately, after having the card for not a very long amount of time, we learned exactly how they were able to give these rebates and coupons and such. The "Due Date" found on a Big Card statement is really not the due date at all. Menards Big Card basically, as I see it, goes about collecting lots of fees in a quite dishonest way. To my family, the "Payment Due Date" means that is the day the payment is due. It doesn't mean that my payment has to be made three days in advance of that to avoid any late fees. I guess, first of all, I should mention that Menards cannot accept payments in the store on the Big Cards that their customers hold such as most stores are able to. Therefore, you will need to either mail your payment or pay online. What we encountered when paying online is that, unless you go into their system MANY days in advance (and I don't mean two), their payments don't post every day or even every other, so you will be required to pay an expedited fee to get your payment to go through on the day you are making the payment. That fee if I recall is $14.95. How nice of them huh? Or, you can put your payment through on the date that their system defaults to, however, then you will get socked with a $29.00 Late Charge Assessment. Did you get that? A "Late Charge Assessment"! Even though, as I type this epinion, the date is Thursday, June 12 at 10:00 p.m. and our Menards statement says "Payment Due Date 06/15/2008"...three days from now, I just went into their system and the nearest day it would allow me to post payment is 06/16/2008. I have contacted Big Card services by telephone about this NUMEROUS times. They were able to credit me the first time it happened and advised me to make my payment a day ahead of time. Did you get that..."a day ahead of time?" Last month, I went on two days ahead of time as told to and we were still billed the late fee due to the date in their system. Now this month, four days!! Obviously, I have closed our account with them. My most recent conversation with their service department involved the woman quite rudely telling me that the system tells you of the expedited option when you go into it. Hmmm, it's puzzling to me that I should have to go in many days prior to the "Payment Due Date" and still have to pay a $14.95 expedited fee. Apparently, the words "Payment Due Date" no longer mean the same as they used to or Menards Big Card has decided that the words "RIPOFF" need to be and should be part of their Menards Big Card slogan.

It's really unfortunate that a store I generally like to shop at has resorted to this sort of method for making an income on their card they provide. I would highly recommend that when you do your Menards shopping, stay away from their Big Card and use another form of payment instead. Unless you really understand their meaning of payment due date, I don't know that the rebates and coupons are worth $29 or $14.95 a month!

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