Like it or not, the Holidays are coming!

I have been seeing Christmas decorations in stores for about a month.  Wow! I've never understood pushing the envelope. Maybe next year they will put the decorations out before Labor Day!

On another note with the Holidays come the requests for the charities for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.  This is where I find a weakness.  I know that there are a lot of people out of work or underemployed.  A lot of families where the income is way down from where it used to be.

There are a lot of charities out there.  some of them are very good spending a large part of their income taking care of their charitable mission.  There are others that will use most of the income for overhead and spend very little on the charitable mission.  Due your job, make sure the charity you are contributing to is on the up and up.  The BBB does keep tabs on them.

I did notice a store with a sign  we would deck our halls after Thanksgiving.  I give them a compliment. 

Visiting with an old friend

A customer came in today and purchased another car.  What is unusual about this is that the last one he purchased was in 1994.  It was a much simpler time.  Sales tax was only  6.8%.    He bought a 1988 Honda Civic.  He paid for it in a couple of years. After it was paid for he came in a few times to say hello.  But today he came in out of the blue and bought an 8 year old Audi.  We spoke for a while about the car and my father and mother who were both very active in the business at that time. I get nostalgic when I look at records from back then.  Everything was lower priced.  The sales tax, The wages and the price of cars. A 9 year old Civic is 50% more than the 4 year old civic was then.

It seems like everything is more expensive, but you are making a lot more than you did back then.  The ultimate question I like to ask.  Are cars and houses worth a lot more today than then or is the money just worth less?

I really appreciate the loyalty that brings a customer back after all that time!

Credit Card Transactions!

Some time ago we started using a virtual terminal to collect payments from our customers. It is a simple process. Open a website, enter the information needed, card number, name address etc, fill in the amount and click, your payment is made.  Convenient and easy.

We didn't realize how easy it is....  The number of fraudulent transactions that people try to pass is unreal.  They get or make up a credit card number, make up an expiration date, security code etc and try to pass it off as a real number.  We have had a few stolen cards go through, which creates a problem for our account, plus we are charged by the transaction whether it is real or fraudulent.  I am not really sure what benefit someone gets by using our site, since we don't ship a product. Maybe it is a test to see if the number will go through so they can try somebody else's site and buy merchandise there.

The reason I mention this is that we have put some new security measures into effect that identify fraudulent transactions so they don't go through.  The main things the customer needs to enter are the name, address, zip code and security code.  If those are correct, your transaction should go through.