OK, Albertans, it's time to rise up and use the law to prevent companies from making oodles from the fact that about 10% of gift cards are never used, or are used long after they're given.
You see, it used to be that stores that sold gift cards imposed artificial deadlines after which the card was no longer valid...a year or 2 years was common. They also imposed extra 'carrying' fees, $2 a month after a year, for example, until the balance was zero.
I recently had the same thing happen to me. I took three cards that I had forgotten about and tried to redeem them at Totem and Sears. As well, I tried to use a Capital One VISA gift card at a retail outlet.
In the end, I scored 0 for 3. The VISA card was no longer valid (no time limit was listed on the card). The Totem and Sears cards were, I was told by store employees, outdated.
Steaming mad, I checked the Alberta Fair Trading Act and found that a distant memory was indeed correct. These gift card practices are illegal in Alberta, and stores that practice them can be fined up to $100,000 for doing so.
I'm on my way back to Sears and Totem to flash the Alberta Gift Card Regulation fact sheet at the store managers and see how fast they say sorry. If they don't, I'm going straight to the provincial consumer affairs people to swear out complaints.
One glitch for may will occur if the stores' records show the cards were purchased before November 1, 2008, when the legislation came into effect. I'm pretty sure my cards didn't sit around that long, so I'm hopeful.
FYI, I have no legal grounds for complaint re the VISA card, because the provincial gift card regulations do not apply to financial institutions.
And BTW, the movie theatre companies (Cineplex comes directly to mind) have figured out a way around this legislation. The adult admission certificates you buy for discounted prices at the AMA, for example, have time limits on them (about a year, I think). If you try to use them after a year, they'll be rejected.
The loophole for the theatres is that under Alberta law, if the gift card (or certificate) is for a specific service rather than for a specific dollar value, the certificate does not fall under the Gift Card Regulations. So beware. It's still a scam, but you can't do anything about it. They're got your money, and that of everyone else who's not used a certificate in time...and they've got it forever!
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Even Consumer Reports does it!
If you're a magazine subscriber of a certain age, it's likely that you can never really remember when you renewed your subscription. So when the magazines send you a series of zappy, insistent, 60% OFF IF YOU ACT NOW!!! letters, at some point you panic and send them their damn money.
Well, it's a real scam. And even Consumer Reports does it.
Consumer Reports will mail you these re-subscription letters repeatedly even if your subscription isn't due for renewal for a full year or more. I've even received my Consumer Reports wrapped in one of those "Don't let this be your last issue!" covers when I had 12 months left to run on my paid subscription.
The scam is that they collect your money a year early, bank it and receive interest until the time REALLY comes for you to renew. For one subscriber, that interest doesn't amount to much. But if you've scammed 400,000 readers for $40 each, that's $16,000,000 sitting in THEIR bank account collecting 90-day T-Bill interest.
Even these days, with those rates around 1%, that's $160,000 that they're collecting. When interest rates return to sane levels, it could run $1 million or more a year.
So if this scam wrankles you and you want to do something about it, here's my suggestion...
Use the magazines' web sites to check the status of your subscriptions, and when you get VERY premature re-subscription notices, simply mail them back to the magazine, in their postage-paid envelopes, only mail them empty.
Believe me, doping this will give you a devilish kind of pleasure!
Well, it's a real scam. And even Consumer Reports does it.
Consumer Reports will mail you these re-subscription letters repeatedly even if your subscription isn't due for renewal for a full year or more. I've even received my Consumer Reports wrapped in one of those "Don't let this be your last issue!" covers when I had 12 months left to run on my paid subscription.
The scam is that they collect your money a year early, bank it and receive interest until the time REALLY comes for you to renew. For one subscriber, that interest doesn't amount to much. But if you've scammed 400,000 readers for $40 each, that's $16,000,000 sitting in THEIR bank account collecting 90-day T-Bill interest.
Even these days, with those rates around 1%, that's $160,000 that they're collecting. When interest rates return to sane levels, it could run $1 million or more a year.
So if this scam wrankles you and you want to do something about it, here's my suggestion...
Use the magazines' web sites to check the status of your subscriptions, and when you get VERY premature re-subscription notices, simply mail them back to the magazine, in their postage-paid envelopes, only mail them empty.
Believe me, doping this will give you a devilish kind of pleasure!
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Edmonton's Chamber Wimps Out - Again!
There is a real irony in the fact that the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has decided to be silent when it comes to the closure of the City Centre Airport.
This city's business community has been hurting the city over the airport issue for at least 10 years longer than most people think.
In the early 1980s, when scheduled passenger service from the City Centre Airport (then called the Municipal Airport, or the ‘Muni’) to Calgary was killing our International Airport's passenger load and, with it, the airport's connections to the outside world, Mayor Laurence Decore convened a series of day-long, monthly meetings of a group he called Enterprise Edmonton.
This group was composed of every politician in the Edmonton area – from all three levels of government, regardless of party – and the Presidents and General Managers of every single business-related organization in the city, including the Chamber, Northlands, the Convention Centre, Tourism and Economic Development Authorities, and of course, the Airport Authority. I attended the meetings as Decore's Chief of Staff.
Decore's single challenge to this group was: let's all agree on Edmonton's top challenges to economic growth, and let's make a plan to meet those challenges, and win.
The group heard many pitches on a wide variety of issues, but in the end, the only issue they ALL agreed on, completely agreed on, was that there needed to be a closure of all scheduled passenger traffic into and out of the Muni. Only in that way, they agreed, could we protect the International's position and allow it to compete with Calgary for airline flights.
The group had heard horror story after horror story about how the Edmonton International’s continued losses to Calgary’s gains was hurting our economy. We lost conventions. We lost brainpower. We lost branch or head offices. We lost Big time!
It was agreed that in order to make this decision 'fly' in the city, absolute unanimity had to be displayed by the politicians and groups who had come to this conclusion.
They all agreed to attend a news conference at which Mayor Decore would announce their collective decision to end scheduled passenger service to the 'Muni'.
The amazing, unbelievable, sick thing is that late on the afternoon of the very day before the news conference was to occur, the President of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce phoned Decore and said that the Chamber was withdrawing its support because a few of its members (presumably the Kingsway Mall businesses, the Chateau Louis and Edmonton Inn hotels and some others) had objections to the Chamber taking a stand against the City Centre Airport. He said the Chamber felt uncomfortable taking a stand that didn't benefit ALL of its members.
A good politician, Decore knew he couldn't possibly win the issue if he didn't have the active support of the business community.
He killed the initiative and canceled the news conference.
And for the next 10 years, Calgary continued to win the airline flight war, and to attract more conventions and both head and branch offices.
Of course, later in the 90s, a modified shutdown of scheduled air traffic came into effect at the airport, but only after our city lost – in my opinion, given the impacts of full passenger service at our second airport that were described to the Edmonton Enterprise group – way over a billion dollars in revenues.
I believe that the decision of the Chamber of Commerce to welch on its commitment – made to every other economic development organization in the city and to all of its elected politicians – to closure of passenger service was the single most costly error ever committed against the interests of the city as a whole.
So you can see why I find it no surprise at all that, yet again, the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has decided to sit firmly and decisively on the bloody fence on the airport closure issue!
They chickened out because (they say) it's a 'political issue'.
The hell it's simply a political issue!
It's an economic issue, an issue with profound impacts on the city's future financial health, on its image in the eyes of both its citizenry and the outside world, on the 2nd largest polytechnical college in Canada, on the cost-effectiveness of the NAIT LRT line and on oodles of other things.
Ironically, a 'new town' of 30,000 people living on the old airport site is sure to bring a big economic surge to the very businesses which have been fighting to stop change for so many years...the shopping centre and hotels in the immediate area. But Envision Edmonton and the Chamber seem to share a willful blindness of this fact.
Envision Edmonton seems essentially a group of old-fart, status quo businesspeople. And now it appears that the Edmonton Chamber isn't very different.
Isn't it ironic that the force that delivered such a big financial hit to Edmonton in the mid-80s and the forces that are working so hard today to resist (or to actively not support) positive change with big economic payoffs is, in fact, the city's business community?
Our business community has a real penchant for living in the past, no matter how hard it hurts the rest of us!
This city's business community has been hurting the city over the airport issue for at least 10 years longer than most people think.
In the early 1980s, when scheduled passenger service from the City Centre Airport (then called the Municipal Airport, or the ‘Muni’) to Calgary was killing our International Airport's passenger load and, with it, the airport's connections to the outside world, Mayor Laurence Decore convened a series of day-long, monthly meetings of a group he called Enterprise Edmonton.
This group was composed of every politician in the Edmonton area – from all three levels of government, regardless of party – and the Presidents and General Managers of every single business-related organization in the city, including the Chamber, Northlands, the Convention Centre, Tourism and Economic Development Authorities, and of course, the Airport Authority. I attended the meetings as Decore's Chief of Staff.
Decore's single challenge to this group was: let's all agree on Edmonton's top challenges to economic growth, and let's make a plan to meet those challenges, and win.
The group heard many pitches on a wide variety of issues, but in the end, the only issue they ALL agreed on, completely agreed on, was that there needed to be a closure of all scheduled passenger traffic into and out of the Muni. Only in that way, they agreed, could we protect the International's position and allow it to compete with Calgary for airline flights.
The group had heard horror story after horror story about how the Edmonton International’s continued losses to Calgary’s gains was hurting our economy. We lost conventions. We lost brainpower. We lost branch or head offices. We lost Big time!
It was agreed that in order to make this decision 'fly' in the city, absolute unanimity had to be displayed by the politicians and groups who had come to this conclusion.
They all agreed to attend a news conference at which Mayor Decore would announce their collective decision to end scheduled passenger service to the 'Muni'.
The amazing, unbelievable, sick thing is that late on the afternoon of the very day before the news conference was to occur, the President of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce phoned Decore and said that the Chamber was withdrawing its support because a few of its members (presumably the Kingsway Mall businesses, the Chateau Louis and Edmonton Inn hotels and some others) had objections to the Chamber taking a stand against the City Centre Airport. He said the Chamber felt uncomfortable taking a stand that didn't benefit ALL of its members.
A good politician, Decore knew he couldn't possibly win the issue if he didn't have the active support of the business community.
He killed the initiative and canceled the news conference.
And for the next 10 years, Calgary continued to win the airline flight war, and to attract more conventions and both head and branch offices.
Of course, later in the 90s, a modified shutdown of scheduled air traffic came into effect at the airport, but only after our city lost – in my opinion, given the impacts of full passenger service at our second airport that were described to the Edmonton Enterprise group – way over a billion dollars in revenues.
I believe that the decision of the Chamber of Commerce to welch on its commitment – made to every other economic development organization in the city and to all of its elected politicians – to closure of passenger service was the single most costly error ever committed against the interests of the city as a whole.
So you can see why I find it no surprise at all that, yet again, the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has decided to sit firmly and decisively on the bloody fence on the airport closure issue!
They chickened out because (they say) it's a 'political issue'.
The hell it's simply a political issue!
It's an economic issue, an issue with profound impacts on the city's future financial health, on its image in the eyes of both its citizenry and the outside world, on the 2nd largest polytechnical college in Canada, on the cost-effectiveness of the NAIT LRT line and on oodles of other things.
Ironically, a 'new town' of 30,000 people living on the old airport site is sure to bring a big economic surge to the very businesses which have been fighting to stop change for so many years...the shopping centre and hotels in the immediate area. But Envision Edmonton and the Chamber seem to share a willful blindness of this fact.
Envision Edmonton seems essentially a group of old-fart, status quo businesspeople. And now it appears that the Edmonton Chamber isn't very different.
Isn't it ironic that the force that delivered such a big financial hit to Edmonton in the mid-80s and the forces that are working so hard today to resist (or to actively not support) positive change with big economic payoffs is, in fact, the city's business community?
Our business community has a real penchant for living in the past, no matter how hard it hurts the rest of us!
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Magazine scams - Premature Renewal Notices
If you're like me, you're always getting magazine reminder notices just about the time that you've forgotten whether you, in fact, did renew only a couple of months ago. I usually recycle the reminder until something screams FINAL NOTICE!!!, then I send in my cheque...and the cycle repeats itself a couple of months later.
In mid-March, my in-laws received a notice from Maclean's magazine. Nicely designed, not to scream-y, kind of businesslike. At the top, it said INVOICE #6, and the due date was March 30, 2010. In the lower portion was a box containing the word "CRITICAL".
The message began: "Your subscription payment to Maclean's is several months overdue – please take immediate action. Attend to this right away!"
Funny thing, though. When I went to the Maclean's website and entered my in-laws' account number, I discovered that their subscription expires on November 15, 2010, fully 7.5 months after the 'due date' on the 'last-minute renewal' notice.
OK, so let's follow the money.
The subscription rate was $48.59 including GST. If we had paid the way-too-early renewal, our payment would have gone into an account somewhere that would pay Maclean's interest until such time as the subscription really need to be renewed and the GST paid.
In short term bonds at, say 1.5% interest, Maclean's (or rather its owner, the Rogers Media Group) would have reaped a total of 45.55 cents in interest from my in-laws' payment.
Multiply that small amount by the number of subscribers to Maclean's, TV Times, Canadian Business, Flare, L'Actualite, Chatelaine, Money Sense and Today's Parent subscribers, and you're talking about a huge money-grab, based solely on the fact that most of us are too busy to remember details like when we renewed a subscription.
Forty-five cents is not a lot of money.
It's the principle, though: Why give someone money if they're scamming you?
And as far as I'm concerned, the wording of the mid-March Maclean's notice was, indeed, a scam.
In mid-March, my in-laws received a notice from Maclean's magazine. Nicely designed, not to scream-y, kind of businesslike. At the top, it said INVOICE #6, and the due date was March 30, 2010. In the lower portion was a box containing the word "CRITICAL".
The message began: "Your subscription payment to Maclean's is several months overdue – please take immediate action. Attend to this right away!"
Funny thing, though. When I went to the Maclean's website and entered my in-laws' account number, I discovered that their subscription expires on November 15, 2010, fully 7.5 months after the 'due date' on the 'last-minute renewal' notice.
OK, so let's follow the money.
The subscription rate was $48.59 including GST. If we had paid the way-too-early renewal, our payment would have gone into an account somewhere that would pay Maclean's interest until such time as the subscription really need to be renewed and the GST paid.
In short term bonds at, say 1.5% interest, Maclean's (or rather its owner, the Rogers Media Group) would have reaped a total of 45.55 cents in interest from my in-laws' payment.
Multiply that small amount by the number of subscribers to Maclean's, TV Times, Canadian Business, Flare, L'Actualite, Chatelaine, Money Sense and Today's Parent subscribers, and you're talking about a huge money-grab, based solely on the fact that most of us are too busy to remember details like when we renewed a subscription.
Forty-five cents is not a lot of money.
It's the principle, though: Why give someone money if they're scamming you?
And as far as I'm concerned, the wording of the mid-March Maclean's notice was, indeed, a scam.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Daughters, singing sons!
Well, the gender bias in Canada's national anthem finally hit the sheer ridiculous last night.
There they were, freshly re-minted Olympic gold medalists all, the Canadian women's hockey team proudly singing along as the Canadian flag was raised in full world view: "O Canada, Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command."
Isn't it time we shook out a few cobwebs and joined the modern world? No argument is capable of surmounting the unfairness inherent in those lyrics.
In all our hearts command...In all of us command...what 'sons' is replaced with is far less important than the very act of replacing it.
There they were, freshly re-minted Olympic gold medalists all, the Canadian women's hockey team proudly singing along as the Canadian flag was raised in full world view: "O Canada, Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command."
Isn't it time we shook out a few cobwebs and joined the modern world? No argument is capable of surmounting the unfairness inherent in those lyrics.
In all our hearts command...In all of us command...what 'sons' is replaced with is far less important than the very act of replacing it.
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