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After recently seeing a list here of some of the unusual rituals of shopping at Aldi, several readers called to note their least favorite and most annoying one had been overlooked.
The bare-bones grocer accepts only cash and debit cards.
No credit cards.
No personal checks.
No exceptions.
It's another one of the ways the German-owned grocer carves out costs by saving money lost to bounced check writers and interchange fees. Those are the hidden, non-negotiable 2 percent-and-up fees that banks and card issuers charge retailers for each credit card transaction.
Many stores limit their personal check risk by hiring a direct-deposit card authorization service. But retailers pay extra for that, too.
"We accept debit cards, because they costs us only a small, fixed transaction fee, not a percentage of the entire transaction which can get pretty high with credit cards," said David Behm, Aldi chief operating officer for Florida. "If it was a small fixed fee, we'd change in a minute."
There is hope: Aldi has a credit card test under way at 15 stores in Oklahoma.
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How do you turn $1.25 in U.S. coins into $24.95? If you are HSN, you package freshly minted half-dollar and quarter commemoratives. Then put color-printed faces of Michael Jackson through stages of his career on them.
The St. Petersburg TV shopping network started selling the King of Pop's collectible coin sets on what would have been Jackson's birthday.
Yes, the Jackson estate gets a share.
They're still on hsn.com.
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The booming, hard-to-ignore presence of Billy Mays has been replaced with calmer voices on Oxi-Clean, Kaboom! and Orange Glo commercials.
TV spots for the Church & Dwight Co. laundry additives now feature three female voices.
The company has a memorial message on its Web site to the Tampa infomercial star who died two months ago. But so far there's no official decision to retire Mays, who has been the only face of the brands for 14 years.
"It would be bad taste to run Billy and so far sales have held up well with these spots, so we're in no rush to decide," said Dan Bracken, director of marketing services.
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Walt Disney Co. surprised Hollywood and Florida's theme park industry with its purchase of Marvel comics and its stable of superheroes.
Disney wanted more characters that appeal to a young male audience, but that overlooks what has been one of the company's fastest growing franchises.
That would be $5 billion in licensed consumer products sold under the label of Cars, a 2006 animated Pixar film.
That's as big as the higher-profile Disney Princess and Fairies product lines.
Cars merchandise sales are down from last year's $2.5 billion, reports Jim Hill, author of a Disney insider blog.
So Disney hopes to keep the franchise going by airing Cars cartoons, scheduling a sequel in 2011 and building a 12-acre Cars Land Radiator Springs village in California.
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