Your Money Has Been Canceled
The gift card did not work, saying "the code is invalid".
I reached out to Apple support and after going through the usual checks "have you typed in the code correctly?" a human support person pick the issue up and quickly explained to me that "this gift card was cancelled at the place of purchase". And that the only option was to contact the Best Buy store.
I tried Best Buy's online chat but the agent was of not much help either. He was apologetic, but the conclusion was to ride back to the store and "the customer service will help you". So I did. Actually the store manager happened to be the customer service person, so without being forwarded like a hot potato, he quickly produced the "POS transaction fingerprint" (a log file spanning 6 pages when printed) and highlighted the item showing the card was actually activated, not canceled. To my complaint that they sold me a product which did not work, his response was they did everything correctly, as proven by the POS fingerprint log and told me to talk to Apple.
Apple then told me to call Best Buy support line. Which I refused, bouncing the support email thread back to them. No answer yet. Basically the key question is who has my money now - has Best Buy actually paid Apple or not?
Super weird, but there are two interesting observations:
- There clearly is a glitch in how Best Buy's POS system interfaces to Apple's digital currency API. Somebody in the implementation of the protocol makes some assumptions which are true for millions of transactions, but not for the one I did last week. In other words, something went wrong. And I'm super curious to learn what.
- I was super impressed by the "POS fingerprint logs" I got from Best Buy. They had every operation, every action which happened at the point of sale. The printout is 6 pages long and I only bought 2 items (the gift card was one of them). It really pays out to have such logs. Without them it would be impossible to troubleshoot the protocol problem.
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