Number Six Speaks

Many thanks to all of you who attended our screenings of the new Michael Moore film Capitalism: A Love Story! Due to popular demand we ended up having three screenings. The first was screening was Saturday night at 7:30. After the screening we has some discussions about why people where there, the problems that they are concerned about, and what people plan to do.

During the second screening – 6:PM Sunday, it was very exciting as Michael Moore himself called in to talk to the assembled group. I rambled to him about my ideas outlined below (which he liked, and agreed to help publicize!), and he took a couple of questions from the group. Many thanks to Michael for the good fight!

One group that we mentioned as being a great group, that is attempting to bridge the divide in this country, is the Trans Partisan Alliance.  We also mentioned the group Move to Amend, which is working to amend the Constitution to overturn the recent Supreme Court decision around corporate free speech.

Now on to Number Six’s ideas for change:

This first one will require LOTS of people to participate, and all of those who participate will need to be serious about participating, as if the ranks break, it will hurt everyone involved.

Don’t pay credit card debt

On a given date (I’m thinking election day Nov 2), everyone participating informs the credit card companies that they owe money to that they will no longer be making payments until certain demands are met. Among those demands would be the requirement that there be no penalties or interest increases imposed on participants. This will need MASS participation,  I figure at least one million people to start with, and hopefully another 5 million plus, who will agree to participate once they see others doing it.  Some demands I could envision might include a public option for health insurance, freeing all prisoners convicted of only marijuana offenses. The list goes on. Imagine the CEO of Bank of America calling congress to demand action on things that normal people want!

Support  Not A Number, Inc for office

As we’ve stated before,  Not A Number, Inc. is going to run for office, most likely Seattle City Council. Support our us in showing how ridiculous it is to allow corporations to run for office.

Help us work out corporate rankings

We all know that corporations have reduced us to numbers, one of those being our credit score. It has an impact on each of us, yet do any of us know how it is derived? I say it is time to turn that on the corporations. What if there was an number given to corporations that indicated their “social responsiblity” status? Do we tell the corporations how this number is derived? No! That information is proprietary, but might include things like how much more the CEO is paid than a line worker, and how much the corporation gives to local charities.

Just informed by a friend that she is selling her boat. If anyone is a nice liveaboard with moorage down at Westlake, grandfathered in at just $318/mont including electric.

1978 Fiberform, recently surveyed to be worth $12,500.

Original purchase price (1 1/2 years ago) $13,000, w/another $17,000 in improvements. She’s asking $12,000. Contact me, if you’re interested. [email protected]

Here’s some facts for any of you who wonder how some of the credit card processing business works. Be aware that this is from the perspective of a small business owner, and thus is very biased and limited in how the credit cards and the banking industry works.

For the record I am VERY PISSED OFF at how the banks took BILLIONS of dollars in our tax dollars in  order to stay in business, yet they still insist on charging up to 30%+ in interest, and outrageous late and overlimit fees. At one time this would have been called loan-sharking; however since our government decided to make this legal (how much money did that cost the banks?), it technically isn’t loan-sharking or usury.

Now on to how the credit cards work – I’m going to put in actual numbers that reflect close  what we (and other small merchants we know) pay. This number will of course be smaller for the larger corporations, who can negotiate better rates based on volume.

When processing a Credit/Debit card it breaks down like this:

If it’s a debit transaction, where you enter your PIN number, the merchant pays a flat fee for the transaction, typically between 35-50 cents.

If it’s a credit transaction, a merchant pays a percentage of the transaction, (for us 1.66%), plus a transaction fee (for us 12 cents). Now that is not all, if the card is a rewards card there is another 2-3% that is charged to the merchant. So for all of you who use your cards to get reward miles/points etc., be aware that the merchant is paying for those, and that the extra costs to the merchant may be reflected in the retail price of the item. I know 2-3% may not sound like much, but consider this, your local restaurant operates on 4-5% margin, so 2-3% can be HUGE to a merchant.

Also be aware that your local merchant may pay a monthly minimum and other miscellaneous fees such as fees for paper reports.

Using our current processor (with the numbers above), we’ve calculated that for us, it is less expensive to process transactions less than $21.00 as credit, and above $21.00 as debit. However, since our average sale is only around $14.00, we simply process everything as credit.

As you can see from the above, the banks want you to use your plastic as a credit card not a debit card, and the larger the transaction, the more they want this. I urge all of you to be aware of this, and if the merchant offers it, process your larger transactions as a debit NOT a credit.

Your debit/credit is a way for the banks to get a cut of every transaction, please use your plastic sparingly, let the banks know that their predatory practices are not appreciated and will not be tolerated. Of course the best way to show this would be to use cash and checks (of course they will get a cut of this too, as many banks now charge extra for cash deposits above a certain amount in a month).

Thanks for supporting your local merchant! Buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have, support the local economy.

Finally, the transition to our new servers seems to be complete.  As part of that transition The Head Cheese and I are each get our own WordPress blog. Previous posts for me can be found here.

What a pain it is to switch hosts! Our new host has a lot of features at a great price (justhost.com); however it’s no fun realizing that our current website will most likely be down for a period of time.  When switching I didn’t realize that for some things to be installed and tested you have to have the domain already switched over. Thus there will be a period where our store website may be unreachable during the transition. Please bear with us.

The other thing I’m annoyed about losing is the catchall email addresses that we had. We had some email forwards set up to catch all the emails we set up such as UnitedAir@, FedEx@.  Most places no longer allow a blanket email forward, thus we will have to set up each one of these explicitly. This is all part of an attempt to cut down on spam – DAM YOU spammers!

This is the new location for the views of Number Six from Not A Number Cards & Gifts. Past posts can be  at NotANumberGifts.