Dang,
. That is what happens when the clutch does not seperate from brain and fingers cleanly.
I’m astonished that layaway is all but disappearing. I worked retail in a small town in Eastern Washington as late as 2001, and layaway was among our most popular services. When my mother put items on layaway at Wal-Mart two years ago, the desk seemed pretty busy. Admittedly it was a poor area with a high illegal immigrant population so
- many immigrants don’t have bank accounts or credit cards because they fear having a big paper trail or they came from countries that have fragile banking systems
- poor people prefer layaway because their financial risks are limited to the items purchased, while as we all know credit accounts can escalate the risk to almost infinite levels due to interest.
No layaway I’ve ever seen required a service charge, just a down payment. I have a sinking feeling this is just a way for Wal-Mart to force its customers to get credit cards and thus profit from the cards’ high interest rates.
I’ve used layaway a few times, and the service fee was very modest…I was saving more than the fee with the sale prices. And if I recall, you didn’t lose your money if you failed to make the payments…you could get a refund, but minus another service fee. I found it convenient to use during a time (right after my divorce) when I no longer had credit cards. And since I still don’t have any credit cards, I wish it wasn’t disappearing.
Lay-by is a very useful service which I avail myself of all the time!
Pretty much every single one of my guns has been purchased by lay-by, since there’s a waiting period for the Permit To Acquire… Lay-by is pretty much a necessity in those circumstances (Find a gun you like, put a deposit on it, apply for PTA, pay it off a bit while you wait for PTA, then finalise when Permit arrives).
It’s also good for clothes and other mid-priced, non-essential purchases that you don’t want to put on the credit card…
FWIW, it’s still offered at most stores here, and it’s very popular, even with the advent of credit cards.
Every year our WalMart brings in several trailers to store Xmas layaway in. They have to get a special permit from the Board of Alderman to park all those things in their parking lot. Between the loss of parking spaces, the cost & aggravation of the permit, and running back and forth from the trailers to the store, I can see why they’d like to get out of it.
To the OP, even though some other people have stated it -
Wal-Mart does NOT charge for lay-away. I don’t know if they did in the past, but they do not now, nor did they when I worked there. THAT is the appeal to the poor - they can get their stuff at EXACTLY what it costs with no interest or fee, and they can pay it at a rate they can afford. My mom bought lay-away for back-to-school and Christmas every year; when she heard that lay-away was going bye-bye she sighed and said “Thank goodness I don’t have children anymore. It would have been impossible without Lay-Away.”
Generally, Wal-Mart wants people to apply for their credit card, and they want the extra space in the back of the store. Unfortunately, this is going to screw over a large segment of the population who don’t have a credit history and need layaway, or to people who screwed up in the past and are trying to make ends meet. While Wal-Mart has no real requirement to take care of those people, and I wouldn’t expect them to because they’re greedy corporate bastards (IMHO), it doesn’t generally say much about what they think of their average customer (if you think their average customer can qualify for a credit card, think again - I make twice what the average Wal-Mart customer makes and have an average credit history with no bad marks, and I didn’t qualify).
~Tasha
From this thread and these links…
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/11/26/Business/The_unlost_art_of_lay.shtml
http://www.venchar.com/2003/12/layaway_program.html
…it makes me wonder if the new WM policy is nationwide or just stores in some neighborhoods. My local store has signs saying they will discontinue it here after the holidays, and my WAG is it is used very little (e.g., no big trailers are parked in the lot). It would be a shame to piss off a lot of loyal customers if it is a popular option elsewhere.
They are pissing off the loyal customers they either want to piss off - customers who avail themselves of layaway - particularly the ones who are trading things in and out of their layaway account and never really buying things - are using resources without creating revenue, or ones that even if pissed can’t really afford to shop other places.
Layaway is an accounting nightmare - its inventory that is in a weird sort of limbo - not available for sale, but you can’t yet book the total revenue against it. It drags out your inventory turnover times - something Wall Street watches.
My local WM isn’t discontinuing it until after this Christmas. Don’t know about others.