Evaluate this...Another Wal-Mart<situation>...

Checks and Debit Cards are Siamese Twins these days... Use a debit card, the money is immediately sucked out of your bank...your money is gone! Write a check...if they run it thru the little register scanner, the money is taken from your account, exactly like a debit card!!!

Both are sucker bets. Get a credit card, use the cc company's money for a month gratis! AND, if you encounter a Poop Storm, the cc company gives you options...

I write checks to only store, and that's my feedstore...the lady who owns the op refuses to go down the cc route, after a customer stiffed her in a bill dispute years ago...

Credit cards are like guns...only evil in the wrong hands...

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

People still write cheques? LOL I don't understand the difference between writing a cheque or using debit, WHY use a cheque? It may be a few cents cheaper, but you still have to balance your chequebook properly, and stores get stung a lot for that. I don't know anything about this 'tele-cheque' thing, but if it's an electronic transaction, would you not ALSO be billed a fee for THAT as you would debit?

Our WalMart doesn't accept cheques at all and I can't say as I blame them. Too many people write bad ones. If you truly have the money in your account and aren't, like someone else said, just hoping that cheque will take a few days to process, then debit shouldn't be a problem. Or, for the sake of buying $20 or so worth of merchandise, there's that old stand-by: cash.

For larger items, there's always debit or credit.....and credit cards only charge interest if you don't pay it off within the month.....but WalMart doesn't care about whether you do that or not, they've already received their payment.

DD

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"The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap."

Check the little papers that come with your credit card statements people!!! A lot of banks are removing the grace period for purchases if you have a current balance on your card! I just got my statement and there was an addendum to credit agreement paper with it. The grace period elimination is just one of many ways banks are trying to get more interest out of your credit card!

They are going to this way of check cashing to avoid bounced checks.
Its a shame for some customers, but I worked in retail and Merchants get charrged a return check fee too. Then the merchant has to chace the customer down for money also.

So in this day and age its become easier just to get the check verified and deducted immediately then go through the hassles of bad checks.

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Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away

WVPEACH (paula)

My bank pays my account 10 cents each and everytime I use my debit card. I only occasionally use it though..because my credit card pays me 1% of every purchase I make. So if my transaction is less than $10.00 (which is seldom) then I use the debit card and earn 10 cents everytime. But when my purchase is $10 or more..my credit card pays me 1% and I don't have any money taken from my account until after I get my bill..and then I still have until I send them the money just before the due date. Either way..I make at least 10 cents for every transaction I make.

Change banks if your bank charges you to use your own money.

I love people like the "feedstore lady". Something minor happened once and this is a great reason to shot yourself in the foot forever. I wonder how many people will not do business with a merchant who refuses credit cards? The other week I was told I was not welcome at a campground because my dog weighed over thirty pounds. I said, "would you mind telling me the "logic" behind this "thinking". The desk help replied, quite sincerely, that the owner's young boy was bitten by a Rottweiler, so most dogs over thirty pounds are dangerous, and therefore are banned from the campground forever. Some people should not be allowed to bred. Why allow stupidity to spread to the next generation? BTW, my dog is an eighty pound Golden. She cares about two things, tennis balls and napping, biting kids is too much work.

If you have a balance on a card and they are charging you 19-21% rates on the balance...Transfer it...We once got in CC debt, and we simply saved all those CC offers for new cards we got in the mail. Most of them come with a 6-12 month "Introductory Fee" of 0% on balance transfers. That means we were able to use those months of NO INTEREST to pay down the debt. As the deadline approached for the trial period to end, we'd transfer the balance again, to another new card, closing accounts and cutting up cards as we went.

If you'll do this, you CAN get out of CC debt without ruining your credit. Of course, you'll have to quit buying on credit cards in order to stay out of debt, or else pay it off every month.

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"The most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." - Sir Isaac Newton
(A REAL scientist)

The CSM or manager turns the key & cancels the last transaction (yours) before another customer is waited on. This voids the last transaction. If the cashier continued to wait on other customers without canceling it after you left then you'll receive a charge on your statement. This would be the fault of the cashier for not alerting management that the transaction needed canceled. My DS worked at Walmart until January this year after I quit in 2004 so I'm pretty up with their system. Basically if you'd taken the groceries & went home you'd only been charged the $20 something change that was your total. The way they process the checks is confusing but really not a big deal unless your bank charges for an automatic transfer of funds.

Merchants have LOST alot of business because of using TeleCheck, somthing that I don't think they are really aware of.

Nobody in my family has ever bounced a check. However, my FIL had cancer and after several hundred thousand dollars of treatment beyond what his medical insurance would cover, he was forced to go bankrupt. Not even my FIL wrote bad checks. He just quit writing checks when the money ran out, and the money ran out quicker than his medical creditors demands on the money did.

His name is the same as my husband's, except that my husband is a Jr.

TeleCheck screwed up the records, best we can tell, and must have recorded his bankruptcy under my husband's name. Had to be that, because we have never bounced a check, have a credit rating in the high 700's (that's very high, for those of you who do not know how FICA scores fall), and just generally are good financial risks.

Anyway, we started having checks refused each and every time we used a business establishment that had that TeleCheck sign posted.

This was back in the late 1990's.

So we began to look for the TeleCheck sign, and if they had it posted, we refused to buy there. It didn't matter if we planned to use cash, or a check.

We were angry about how TeleCheck screwed up our record and caused us the embarrassment of having to deal with their mistake, so we decided we would never shop at a TeleCheck merchant again.

And with the one exception of the specialized brazziere company that I buy my specially fitted bras from, we have not shopped at any place with the TeleCheck sign for at least the last eight or so years.

And we will not shop at one of those places for the next 50 years either.

I wonder just how many thousands or even tens of thousands of other consumers have decided to quietly boycott TeleCheck using establishments?

I don't get it. If Tele-cheque and writing regular cheques can be such a pain, why do y'all use them at all? Don't blame the stores for offering it, they wouldn't do so if people didn't request it. The more services a store offers, the more educated the salesclerk has to be about using them, and you know how that goes. Salesclerks that are 'just passing though' that don't give a hoot, and you will find that EVERYWHERE. If I don't get satisfaction from a clerk, I talk to the manager....let's face it, the manager is more likely to help; he gets paid more and takes the flak from the higher ups. Many clerks are making minimum wage or so and just there to fill in the time between high school and college.

Use a simpler way of paying for things and save yourself some grief.

DD

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"The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap."

This happened to the wife and I at the local chinese buffet. We wrote a check, and she scanned the check and did an electronic withdrawal from the account. I didn't like it as I could have just used the card for the same account and saved writing the check. After all, the checks cost me money, why waste 'em?

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veni, vidi, volgavi

I think that the stores use Tele-cheque, etc., because they get the money in their account immediately, not because the customers want it. The customers don't even know what it its until they start using it in the stores.