Cash Or No Cigar

Millions of years ago, gold washed down mountain streams and got deposited in creek beds at the foot of the hills. You may have heard the expression: "Thar's gold in them-thar hills." But it just ain't so. Gold bottoms out, in the creek beds, that is. After the '49ers rushed California, the Federal Reserve created the Gold Standard as the national monatary exchange. Over the years that has changed so that today we don't even know what our currancy standard is.

During the NHL time out to discuss contracts, shopping malls began to form and with the same uncertainty that the rest of us share about the value of the dollar bill, they inevitably developed the policy of accepting credit cards only. ( I dare you. Make a purchase and just try to pay for it with cash! )

Many card companies color code their plastic to confuse us, making it look like gold to lure us into false complacency and advertising "gold card" benefits.

Even so, Discover and the Diners Carte Blanche Club people aren't that well off. They have a major problem with discard rates. That happens when people skip willy-nilly from one company to another, discarding their current DNA-fingerprinted-credit-card before acquiring another. And folks at Discover can't rely on advertising lower interest rates to keep their customers, either.

Face it, if you've got a full house of weekend guests, 14 or so, and it's Saturday night at 8:45 when the ONE AND ONLY latrine goes belly-up, you're not going to care what the interest rates are on your credit purchase. Your main concern is getting to a store before closing and preferably one which will accept the card you carry.

There comes the rub. All credit cards are not created equal. Even though they say their card is welcomed everywhere, many are not. But how does a guy figure out, which ones are accepted universally?

It was Suzy, my friend's wife, who developed a foolproof plan to test the market usability of each card. The only hitch was - she never told Joe, her husband.

Soon, he'll discover the brilliance of her market research and when he does that trick muscle along his jawbone will trigger that blank, helpless expression one gets which rather resembles that of a dandelion's just before you hydrochloroformate it with Raid.

Just joking. The muscle alongside his jawbone spazzed out years ago, when he was a newly-wed. Now he looks at these things with passive-aggressive calmness.

Suzy shoved CITI Bank Cards, Visa Cards MasterCharge Cards, Sears, American Express, Speedway Gas Credit Cards, and a slew of others, all of which had come in the mail from people they didn't even know, into her purse, and began the noble pursuit known as shopping which she approached scientifically by starting with the 24 business categories listed in the "A"s and not stopping until the final 21,803rd category when she was within earshot of zippers.

Her lightweight purse was easy to carry. Nethertheless, the credit cards gained weight (as inanimate objects tend to do when carried long distances) and at day's end weighed so much she had to drag the Naugahyde bag behind her by its thong.

At each of the one hundred-and-thirty-five thousand, three hundred-and-sixty shops she visited, she spread two acres of credit cards on the counter, and asked the proprietor to choose which ones he accepted, before she made her purchase.

Meanwhile, unsuspecting Joe accepted the home deliveries. He stored them in the living room, the dining room, the spare room, the attic, the basement, the garage, the utility shed, the driveway, and just before dark overtook him he was at the neighbors renting storage space.

The conversation between this blissfully wedded couple when Suzy returned after the stores closed sounded like:

"What the h_ _ _ is all this?" Joe tried to wave his arm around to encompass everything but there wasn't room for an arm sweep.

"Now calm down, Joe. I was just doing a little scientific market research on credit card acceptance."

Joe (incredulously ): "You bought all this with credit cards?"

"You don't have to shout, Joe. I merely showed the credit cards to see how many were accepted where."

"Er . . . if you didn't use the credit cards, what did you pay with?"

"I was very practical, Joe. You should be proud of me. Everything was paid for with cash to save us from paying interest rates."

Like a hyperactive calculator, Joe's fevered brain tallied the total expenditure. "How'd you get that much cash?"

"Well, I . . . ."

A light socket exploded in his cranium. "You mortgaged the house!"

"Yes, but you're missing the point, Joe. Now I have enough information for an article about credit card spending which the Economist has promised to publish."

Joe's voice was dangerously quiet. "They pay what? Thirty-four bucks per article?"

Suzy quickly added, "And I contacted Huppin, Huppins and Wetzell Auctioneers who will be here tomorrow to sell everything." Her bottom lip quivered and a tear escaped her eye. "They're very successful auctioneers and they promised to get it all sold, one way or another, before Sunday."

Joe, who was a sucker when it came to Suzy's tears, put his arm around her and later, they fell asleep wedged between boxes of Schotthauser's Ammunition Reloaders and Toufflotte's Molded Plastics Assembly Kits.

The following Monday after Joe liquidated the mortgage loan and walked out of the bank, he shrugged philosophically and thought: It could have been worse. If Suzy had been working on an article about Bush's financial strategy, we'd be * 7,671,700,332,790 dollars and 18 cents* in debt. A mere 96 dollar deficit isn't so bad compared to that.

Joe, whistling a jaunty hip-hop tune, walked blithely down the street and considered himself a lucky man.

Cash Or No Cigar © 2005 Chaeli Sullivan
Note: * $ 7, 671,700,332,790.18 * is actually our current national debt on 2/16/05
Source: publicdebt.treas.gov