Subway overcharged a customer more than $1K, took 7 weeks to refund it

A woman in Columbus, Ohio, said it took about seven weeks to get a refund for the more than $1,000 she was erroneously charged for a three-sandwich Subway meal.

Letitia Bishop told FOX Business on Monday she incurred the $1,000 charge on her debit card back in early January while getting Subway sandwiches from a now-closed restaurant located within a Thorntons gas station. ABC 6 first reported on her experience.

A source at Subway told FOX Business that Bishop’s refund occurred Saturday morning. She confirmed receipt of a cash payment as the refund and said it came from someone who she believes was a regional manager at Thorntons. Subway put her in touch with them late last week, a development earlier reported by Business Insider.

Getting the refund was not an easy feat, Bishop told FOX Business, and it only came after her experience got picked up by news outlets. She also complained to the Better Business Bureau.

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"When I arrived there [at the location] to actually pick up my food [on Jan. 5], the Subway workers basically told me that there was no way to instantly credit me back, and I’d have to talk to Subway’s guest care online to do so," Bishop said. "It’s been pretty difficult to actually get a hold of anybody through Subway at all."

She said she also encountered difficulties when she contacted her bank, Huntington Bank, and Thorntons while trying to fix the issue, on top of numerous instances of reaching out to Subway. FOX Business reached out to Huntington Bank and Thorntons for comment.

Huntington Bank said it had to investigate the charge, according to Bishop, who reported having negative customer service experiences with the bank during that time. 

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"There’s supposedly a Subway portal that [the Subway location] is supposed to use for the customer back," Bishop also told FOX Business, but she said the Thorntons representative who gave her the refund said she "didn’t know how to use it, which was clearly why I was in this situation in the first place, that the people who were running the business didn’t know how to use the proper stuff to help the customers who come into their restaurant."

Bishop said the joint account she has with her husband "has been negative because we weren’t expecting this huge charge to come out."

Her family was hit with more than one overdraft fee after the $1,000 overcharge at the Subway location, according to Bishop. She said "there were times when I had to make difficult decisions about what I was going to be able to pay for my bills and sometimes I wasn’t able to actually put in a grocery order for my family."

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Once she put the refund in her bank account on Saturday, the bank put a hold on it, according to Bishop. She told FOX Business a Huntington Bank representative told her Monday that they would clear the hold.  

She also said the bank previously "gave me another provisional credit until the investigation was completed."

There are nearly 60 total Subway restaurants in the Columbus area, according to the Subway website. Those are part of the nearly 37,000 available around the world.