By now most people have heard that Walmart Canada announced it will soon stop accepting Visa credit cards. The reason they cite is that “the fees applied to Visa credit card purchases remain unacceptably high.” Visa now has a public response, but it is not at all convincing. Visa accuses Walmart of believing “that their cost to accept Visa cards should be much lower than all other merchants – lower than local grocery stores, pharmacies, convenience stores – and yes, charities and schools too.” Walmart’s announcement didn’t include a demand for lower costs than other retailers. All Walmart said was that Visa’s costs were too high for Walmart. Visa could reduce costs for all retailers if they want. This just looks like an attempt by Visa to pit Walmart against other retailers and portray them as greedy. Walmart doesn’t control what Visa charges charities and schools. Visa accuses Walmart of “unfairly dragging millions of Canadian consumers into the middle of a business disagre...

I don’t shop much. I like to say that there is only one shopping day left until Christmas because I’ll only shop one day. But my wife and I wandered into Future Shop recently, and I'm pleased to say that they saved me from an impulse purchase. As we entered, a young employee was hurrying by, but he took the time to pause and say “Hi guys! Welcome.” Despite the fact that I still find it sounds strange to hear a woman included among “guys,” the friendly gesture improved my already good mood. I then made an impulse decision to buy a piece of electronics whose price is about $100. Stepping quickly to find a cash, I found none had any cashiers. No problem, though, because there were a couple of desks on the other side with employees behind them. The first desk was the “customer service desk” where one customer with multiple receipts laid out was waiting for an employee seated on a chair facing the other way. The prospects didn’t look good. The second had a young guy tappin...

I recently came to the sad realization that I needed a new pair of shorts and maybe a dress shirt too. I would have to (gasp!) go to a clothing store. For some reason these stores group everything by meaningless brand names instead of just having all the shorts or shirts of the same size located together. Even more puzzling is having my purchases ring up at the cash register for less than the marked price. I’m pretty good at looking around for signs that say something like “25% off marked price.” So, I usually know what price to expect when I get to the cash register. But many stores (Sears and The Bay come to mind) seem to routinely charge me less than I expect. I remember buying some socks a year or so ago and the lady at the cash actually apologized for the fact that I’d have to pay the marked price; she then suggested that I might want to go back and choose different socks! Fortunately, I declined; they turned out to be good socks. What advantage does this give the reta...

I recently received what appeared to be a reminder from McAfee to renew my subscription to their antivirus software. On the surface this seems like a useful reminder service for an existing customer who wants to maintain continuous security coverage for my PC, but all is not what it seems. A curious omission from the McAfee email was any mention of when my subscription expires. After some digging for an old password, I was able to log in to my McAfee account to discover that my subscription will last another 20 months! Why would I want to extend my subscription for another year or two now? There’s half a chance that my PC won’t even be working by then. Another annoyance is that McAfee renewed an old subscription on a PC that I had scrapped. I thought I had been careful to check the “never automatically renew” box, but either I missed it or this box got reset somehow. Fortunately, renewal attempts by McAfee don’t work if I have an updated credit card with a new expiry date and...

We’ve all heard horror stories of Canadians getting massive wireless phone bills because they used a service they thought was covered by their plan, but their provider disagrees. Fear of this sort of problem makes some people shut off their phones whenever they travel, particularly in foreign countries or even just close enough to the U.S. border to get picked up by a U.S. tower. I think I have a partial solution to this problem. No doubt there are situations where a wireless phone user knowingly runs up a multi-thousand dollar bill because he or she is doing something just that important. But most of the time, people running up huge bills would stop whatever they were doing if they knew the costs were so high. What if your phone were to pop up with a message on the screen saying “you have now incurred $50 in extra charges so far this month” and demanded that you type in some password to continue? If you continued to use extra services, you’d get messages at $100, $150, and so ...

Years ago I was buying a piece of furniture and was offered a "don't pay for one year" deal. I innocently asked whether I could get a discount if I paid right away. The answer was a firm no and my attempts to continue negotiating failed to lower the price. It wasn't until years later that I learned why. If you fail to pay the full amount on time, you get hit with high retroactive interest back to your purchase date. If enough people fail to pay on time, the zero interest for a year deal can actually be profitable for the finance company. To make things a little more concrete, I looked up a major retailer's don't pay for a year deal. At this store, if you pay on time, there is no interest and no extra fees of any kind for a year. If you are short one penny when the year is up, you pay 12 months of 2.4% interest (32.9% for the year after compounding) on the entire purchase. If the retailer just offered regular financing, let's say that the intere...

A while back I wrote briefly about being given a gift certificate for Amazon in the UK rather than Canada. My wife made her first purchase on the certificate and, amazingly, the total cost was less than if we had ordered the items in Canada. My wife bought some school books, clothing, and a runner’s water bottle for a total of £208.33, which the Bank of Canada currency converter says is equivalent to $336.93. This includes shipping (£18.36) and import fees (£19.36), but we didn’t have to pay the UK’s value-added tax (VAT). The same order in Canada would have been $368.21, which includes GST on the books and the full HST on the other items, but no shipping charge for such a large order. In total, we saved about 8.5% by ordering from the UK instead of Canada. This is definitely a case of YMMV, but the next time you place an order with Amazon it might pay to see what the order would cost if placed with Amazon (or some other company) in another country.

In retailing, the “long tail” refers to the great many products that have only a small demand. Bricks and mortar retailers prefer to sell products that everyone wants regularly, but online retailers are better at satisfying the long tail demand. This can cause consumers to be dissatisfied with their traditional bricks are mortar retailers. When I’m looking for something I need, like many people, I start with an online search to see what’s available. The incredible breadth of retailers available to online searching often results in my finding an item even better for my needs than I first imagined. The next step is to decide where to buy my desired prize. Buying from an online retailer is often a problem because it is usually in the U.S. and shipping leads to annoying delays and extra charges at the border. This leads me to search local retailers for the item I want. But, these retailers often don’t have the item I want. They have an apparently weak selection that doesn’t in...

Being a victim of a Ponzi scheme is a terrible blow. However, life doesn’t seem to work out very well for the Ponzi scheme operators either after they get caught and go to prison. There must be some way to come out ahead with one of these schemes. Here’s my best shot. Start by setting up an investment company with some confusing-sounding plan that purports to make 20% return each year. Maybe the marketing would include stuff about sector-rotating bottom-up technical analysis wave theory. A potentially tricky bit is that investor funds would have to be protected by either the Canadian CIPF (Canadian Investor Protection Fund) or the American SIPC (Securities Investor Protection Corporation). Next, find some reasonably healthy 70-year old and make him the following offer. If he pretends to be the person who owns and runs this investment company he’ll get a pile of money. Then find investors who agree to sink $10,000 into the fund for the long term. You would be one of these in...

Global sales of personal computers dropped just over 7% in the first quarter of 2009 (the web page with the supporting article has disappeared since the time of writing). It’s tempting to blame this on the current state of the economy, but I think there are other things going on. In the past, most personal computer upgrades were needed to get a more powerful processor or more memory to run the latest useful application. This reason is starting to fade. Most personal computers bought in the last couple of years are powerful enough to show videos, the most demanding application used by almost everyone. Upgrading a PC to run the latest video game still goes on among gamers dedicated to having the latest fast-moving game, but they are a fairly small minority of PC owners. Most people are content with simpler games that run just fine on a PC that is a year or two old. Even the widespread use of Firefox has made browsing faster and more reliable, thus reducing the need to replace o...

Lee Valley Tools Ltd. has initiated a class action suit against Canada Post over shipping charges. Before 7 years ago, Canada Post charged for shipping packages by weight. Then they introduced a new system where they charged for either weight or volume depending on which gave the higher charge. The idea was to charge more for big bulky packages that take up a lot of space, but aren’t very heavy. This all sounds reasonable enough, except that Lee Valley alleges that the machine Canada Post uses to measure volume can overstate the volume by as much as 20%. Another allegation against Canada Post in all this is that they keep any overpayments. Commercial customers have to weigh their packages and calculate the charges themselves. If Canada Post finds that the customer paid too little, they demand more money, but if the customer pays too much, Canada Post keeps the difference. Nice. If Canada Post loses this suit, it could be very costly for them. Of course, if Canada Post loses and ...