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.

Christmas!

It was a good Christmas for us.  We closed the business Christmas Eve and Christmas Day giving us an unusual 3 day weekend.  Also time to finish up the shopping, decorating and preparations for the Christmas dinner.  We went to an "All Class Happy Hour" Thursday evening.  Saw a few members or my class and other people that I knew from other years.  Since Gerard High School has been closed over 20 years, it is hard to keep people connected. 

We went to church and it wasn't as crowded as I expected.  The priest who said Mass, Fr. Joe, was a military chaplain for years.  At the end of the service he made a comment that took me by surprise.  He said that 10 years ago he had been a chaplain in Afghanistan and had said Christmas Mass for the troops.  He then said that after 10 years there, the situation hasn't changed.  You could hear his voice waver a bit as he repeted the statement.  It makes me wonder why we are there.

Christmas day was great.  There were 5 grandchildren there with their parents.  It was fun watching  them open the presents.  The highlight was when I turned the ipod on and played "Jingle Bells"  After about 4 bars all 5 started singing and went on for 4 or 5 choruses. It was not planned, but we all enjoyed it. We then had a dinner that was fit for a king.  Then we sat, talked and watched football until late in the evening. A perfect ending for a very special day.

I hope yours was as good

Title Loans, Playing With Fire!

Over the years we have purchased a good number of cars because of tile loans.  The customer needs extra cash and gets the title loan.  He can then afford the interest payments on the loan, but when the principal comes due, he isn’t able to afford it.  He then renews the loan again.  It becomes a vicious cycle.  He gets to a point and either sells the car to pay it off or trades it in on another car that has more manageable payments.

I saw one last week that stunned me.  I know the interest rates on these loans can be in the 300% annual range.  A person brought two documents in on her title loan.  She wanted help to bail it out.  The first document was about 10 days old.  It had a payoff of about 45,00.  The car was repossessed the next day.  The second document was the payoff after the repossession, the payoff was about $10,000.  How the payoff can double that quickly doesn’t make sense.  There  were repossession fees included, but only around $300.  The only thing reason that makes any kind of sense is if there was a penalty for early payoff included in the loan.

 There are a lot of varieties of title loan.  I do not know them all.   If you are going to get a title loan make sure you have read all the fine print.  Make sure you understand what could happen if you miss the payment.  I really, really felt bad for the person in this example who lost her car.  I hope she goes to the Department of Financial Services who regulate these companies to make sure everything the title loan company did was legal. 

Have You Ever Wondered?

Last week we got a beautiful 92 Mercedes 500SL convertible. Bright red, tan leather and 113,000 miles.  I haven't driven one of these for a while, but they are fun to drive.  This one is also very nice so it can also turn a head or two.  Saturday night my wife and I went to a movie.  As usual the parking lot was full but there was  valet parking available. Have you ever looked at the area around the stand where the valets work.  Usually the high dollar cars are parked right up close so the owners do not have to walk very far.  I told my wife "watch what happens".  She looked at me as if she was thinking "What are you talking about".  As we pulled up to the valet area, there were 5 or 6 cars waiting to be parked.  I noticed that there was an Escalade and another car parked right at the curb and there was a space right in front of it.  As we got out of the car the valet said, Its getting close to 8:00 and we will be leaving about 9:30 so what I will do is park your car right here up front and bring the key back to you so you won't have problems when the movie is over.  That's exactly what he did. The 5 or 6 cars in front of us sat while he moved ours to the place of honor.  I hadn't asked anything special, but I was impressed with what happened. 

Bottling our tap water to make a profit.

There was an article in the August 10, 2000 Arizona Republic that Niagara will be building a new plant in Phoenix. This will be their 9th bottling and distribution facility that will run 24/7/365. It is estimated that it will bottle over 100 million gallons per year, almost 3 acre feet of water. After seeing the picture of Lake Mead in the paper last week at its lowest level in 54 years, do we really want someone opening up this type of business in Phoenix? We are as closer to water rationing that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

I remember the days when every business, church or school had a water fountain and we used them. The bank I go to almost every day originally had a water fountain in the lobby where you could get a drink. Several years ago they remodeled the bank and the water fountain came out. Now they have the 5 gallon bottle dispenser, which works most of the time unless it is out of water or cups or both.

I am the guy who doesn't trust water he can't taste. I very rarely buy a bottle of water. In our office we have water bottles for customers but I usually drink from the water fountain or fill up my reusable bottle from it. The city of Phoenix bills water usage by unit of 748 gallons. The smmer months are billed at $3.51 per unit. or .00469 per gallon. I was really thirsty last week and bought a liter bottle of water, it cost about $1.50. So I can give the city $1.50 and get about 350 gallons of water or get a liter of water in a nice plastic one use bottle for about the same cost. Is it really worth it?????