I have to laugh at American Express.

I have to laugh at American Express.

They’re constantly on the television with commercials touting their small business credit cards, and every month I receive several direct mail pieces from them telling me how they help small businesses grow. Go to their website and they have small business forums and directories, and they say they have small business events (though, I don’t recall ever being invited to one).

You would think they cared about small businesses based on their marketing - but I guess the rest of the company hasn’t gotten the message - and that’s why I have to laugh.

On at least eight occasions in the last two years I have tried to contact American Express to offer my services to them, and to say that I was rebuffed would be kind - I was ignored.

They have these incredible barriers higher than the walls of the ancient city of Troy to prevent you from actually getting to someone to talk to, and if you find a name and address thanks to the internet, you get no - zero - response.

Buried deep on their website is - supposedly - a place to submit proposals to them online. I must have tried that ten times over a two month period and it never seemed to be working. Once you went through the process of filling out the online form and pressed the send button, a window always popped up that said comeback later. It’s pretty obvious what they meant is don’t come back - ever.

I’m not feeling the love from American Express.

I’m a small business entrepreneur and I’ve been a member with my personal card since 1978, and my corporate card since 1991. I’ve had Green, Gold, Platinum, Blue, Plum (no Black) and Delta American Express Cards, yet I can’t get any manager at any level to return my calls, respond to my emails, or answer my correspondence, when I contact them about offering my company’s services to them.

For example, I wanted to be one of those companies that get listed as offering discounts to members in the monthly statement. Got no response to that one.

I have a foreign language translation company and somewhere on their website they say they provide this service to global travelers (I think just those folks with the Black card), so I contacted them to tell them about our capabilities. Got no response to that one.

I already mentioned the online proposal process (or non-process) and correspondence I sent to senior executives whose names I picked off the internet have never been answered.

To be fair to American Express, they’re not alone in ignoring the small businesses they claim to represent. All the credit card companies are much the same. However, American Express offers my type of service to their members (and the other credit card companies don’t), so you would think they’d be a little more open to speaking with small businesses.

And to be fair to the credit card companies, lots of large corporations in many categories don’t want to be fair in dealing with small businesses even though they want to sell to them.

I got a call from a publisher of business books (including those focused on small businesses) in the New York area, and they wanted to meet to discuss translating some of their materials into Spanish. If I was interested in coming to a meeting, I could fly out from California at my own expense - which I did.

Because this initiative was so important to them, there were over a dozen people at the meeting and they flew in product managers from London, Miami and Chicago. That turned into the first of three trips back to their offices (all of which I paid for out of my own pocket) and 18 months of discussions about products, deliverables, etc. In fact, their foot dragging was so slow that now, in order for me to complete the project on time, I would have to incur rush charges.

Finally, I received the agreement from their attorneys and I noticed a funny clause that was never discussed in any meeting or email. They only make payments to vendors in my category twice a year, and the soonest one could receive payment was 90-days after completion of the project. Looking at the calendar, it meant that I wouldn’t be paid for my company’s work for 18 months after we finished the project. I would incur $70,000 worth of expenses and they wouldn’t pay me for 18 months.

Obviously, I had to back out of the deal and they had some very harsh words for me. They kept telling me how much they invested based on my promises of commitment; that they had already printed the promotional material and now they would have to re-print.

So I asked them for some payment in advance, and to that they responded, “We don’t do that kind of thing.”

Anyway, I’m not certain why large corporations feel that small businesses are just there to be taken advantage of, but many do. But why I have to laugh at American Express is that they think they’re fooling us and making us small businesses think they really care about us.