I have been in two stores in the South Bay, a Rite-Aid and an Am-Pm Mart, where you get hit with a blast of air on the way in, as the doors close behind you. Great for messing up your hair.
Negative Option Billing.
With the exception of the cable company, I don’t leave my credit card on file or sign up for perpetual contracts where the onus is on me to cancel in advance. Specifically SiriusXM. Even if I wanted to use their service, I wouldn’t because of their billing practices.
There’s a policy that I practice that will cost me a sale or two if it hasn’t already - I charge my clients the finance charge if they wish to pay through a credit card processing service. So if you decide to opt for the “convenience” of using our PayPal account on a $5,000 order, you will get charged $136.75 (2.73%5,000, +.25 that they tack on for no reason whatsoever) for that convenience. I work in a high-volume, low margin business and I’ll be damned if I’m losing 10%+ of my gross margin to finance charges.
*That $.25 might be Intuit Processing, however. I have one client that insists I use Intuit, so I have to estimate the service fee and add it on to the invoice.
Just a heads up that this is illegal in many jurisdictions. Merchants are not allowed to put surcharges on credit card sales - sometimes by state or local law, very often by the merchant agreement itself.
You can usually offer a “cash discount,” but if the payment is essentially immediate for you (cash, check, credit card, goldfish) it all counts as “cash/no finance terms.” You can only charge a finance charge if you are not paid immediately and accrue costs while waiting normal business terms (15 days, 30 days, 90 days) for full payment.
So you might want to check with your merchant account provider and your state legal jurisdictors to see how you can legally charge customers for different kinds of payment.
Shit, you’re right.
Nice thing about owning a small business is that a major policy shift like “no longer accepting credit cards” is that it can be done just… like… that. Appreciate the advice!
There’s an arrangement between Shell Oil and some supermarket chains–in my area it’s Ralphs. Buy enough at the store and get something like 10c off per gallon the next time you go to that station. Unfortunately, the Ralphs card is in my Mom’s name, but I do the driving and pay for the gas–so far they say I don’t qualify for the discount.
The “perfect survey”
More than a few places have asked me to fill out a survey about their services when I’m done. I’ve had many employees tell me that if I don’t fill it out and that if I give anything less than a perfect score, they get penalized.
I’ve no idea how true that is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true. And I don’t want to screw over someone who did an adequate enough job, even if the service wasn’t perfect. So I’ll fill it out and give them perfect scores. The company now has utterly useless feedback (and will never improve on actual problems) and because I try to avoid companies that treat their employees like that, they’ve lost a customer.
I’ve had the same experience – I filled out a survey but deliberately inflated the scores since it was a 1 to 10 system, I figured it would be dishonest to give a 10 for something that didn’t really stand out, but nothing except the things that really were wrong were less than a 7 out of 10. I still got an email back asking me for specifics on why I had scored some of the categories below a 9.
So like you my input will from now on be useless. But I’m still not going to give perfect scores, I just won’t take the survey at all.
My experience with Home Depot has been different from either of the commenters here: I could walk in and easily find an employee, but they’d all be clueless. Oh, if you knew the exact serial number of the part you needed, they could find it, but if I knew that, I probably wouldn’t need to ask. But try to ask “I need a part for joining a piece like this to one like that”, and they go glassy-eyed.
Contrast the locally-owned single-location big hardware store I started going to instead, and the clerks, all of them, would reply by asking more about the project I was doing, and offer suggestions on how to do it even better than the way I was thinking. I don’t know how they got so many skilled employees, and it probably involved paying them more, but it meant repeat business.
Might have been a really complicated one (lots of small items that had to be rung individually, etc.).
I remember one customer I had at my current job in a thrift store. OK, I’m pretty new on the register, but for a cart full of small items, 5-10 minutes wasn’t horribly slow, really (no one said anything about it). Took five people (one supervisor, two leads, one considerably more experienced cashier, and me) at least 10 minutes to bag up this cartload of fragile items with appropriate wrapping to give the stuff at least some chance of reaching the customer’s home intact.
I’d much rather see that than Jerry Springer (NO thanks, Pep Boys, and I didn’t appreciate not being able to find a remote to change it to something less disgusting).
I’ve noticed this is fairly prevalent among smaller bars in Chicago. I think they deliberately don’t post hours to give them the freedom to close early if the bar is totally dead. A weekday or Sunday night without any major sporting events can mean they’re keeping the bar open for one customer who is nursing a beer for 2 hours.
Three times a customer of mine had me run a garage sale for them. Usually it failed. They never put prices on merchandise, never stayed outside to help me, never furnished racks or clothing sizes, never gave me change. And they had planned this for two weeks or more!
Actually, this page suggests 95% of cards have no annual fee, and that percentage has been increasing rapidly. A tiny fraction of people opt for cards with an annual fee, not “most”. And I suspect some of them know what they’re doing. High spenders can get better rewards from certain reward cards with an annual fee. So the fraction of people using annual-fee cards foolishly might well be much lower than 5%.
Your info is out of date. This changed in 2013. Surcharges are still prohibited in a few states, but no longer by merchant agreements. See Visa’s site or this article in Time, for example.