Oops. I'm supposed to read those statements?

I'm conducting an experiment to see how large corporations deal with angry customers who use the web to tell their stories.

Now the sordid details about how I got to this point are posted below and to be honest, it's a pretty petty thing.

But I felt mistreated enough to head out, and in a particularly sour and vindictive mood, registered the domain name www.DontBuyBowflex.com. Setting up a page with my story is a simple matter of waiting for the DNS to propagate.

But how will Bowflex react to this? I'm starting by sending them an email explaining my intentions. I'll post the response I get and see if they take me seriously.

Here's what started all of this. And yes, I do understand that this is my fault.

For the last couple of days, we've been receiving phone calls from HSBC Retail. They haven't left messages and so I just assumed they were some solicitor or political polsters.

So this morning (Sunday) when they called at 8 a.m., I picked up - prepared to tell them to stop calling and take me off their list.

Turns out it wasn't a solicitor at all, but rather someone asking why I was $104 late on payments for my Bowflex exercise machine. Ouch.

In terms of online banking, the web has made my life much easier (or so I thought). Like many people, I set up a monthly payment and forget about it, secure in my knowledge that the funds will get transferred every month.

Although in this case, my sense of security was a false one. Online bill pay has made me lazy, so lazy in fact that I hadn't even opened my last few statements from Bowflex.

Had I opened the May statement, I may have realized that my minimum payment had changed. Oops. Had, I opened the June statement, I would have realized that I was paying less than the minimum payment and was therefore getting hit with a $39 late fee and owed $68. Oops. Had I opened the July statement, I would have noticed that I had another $39 late fee and now owed $104. Crap.

So after an hour and a half on the phone talking to 5 different people, I finally found out that my minimum payment had changed because my promotional interest rate had changed. I wish they would have called, emailed or even sent me a letter stating that this change had occurred.

I was also unsuccessful in my request for even half of the fees to be reversed. So now I'm stuck paying an extra $80. 

Granted I was a bit angry and probably used some words I shouldn’t have, but the customer service agents I talked to were all incredibly rude and argumentative, which in the end really made me more angry.

One last thing to note is that I've had many other problems with this account. They've changed my payment due dates (you guessed it - more late fees), and haven't been able to process my payment on time (you guessed it - more late fees).