I MAY HAVE HELPED START A PROBLEM

Earlier today I was checking in on the Chat with the Chamber blog and about Cheri's problem of trying to pay cash while buying gifts.

This may make me sound old once again, about my sophomore year of high school I had a really neat job and probably my first job with real responsibility to produce results by selling to someone who did not come to me as during the past two years at Cornell's Clothing. I was working for the Newark Trust Company, at the time a large bank based in Newark, Ohio.

My self and one fellow named Tom Deweese and two girls were in charge of selling MasterCard to the merchants in the Newark and Heath, Ohio areas for the summer. We would leave the bank early in the morning (I was the only not old enough to drive yet) and visit the retail merchants, gas stations (before they sold beer and milk), restaurants, bars & physician offices and discuss with the merchants the reasoning for accepting MasterCard. They were amazed that when they would bring the receipt in with their deposits to the bank, their account would be credited within 24 hours the sum of money the person had charged.

Only the former Kline's, Sears & Carroll's Dept. Stores actually had a plastic charge card you carried with you. Most merchants could not turn down a couple of high school and college kids telling them about the future of how people will never carry cash money. Shortly after our summer of selling, the bank mailed out thousands of cards to there customers.

The best part of the job was after hours, we would revisit our new customers and place decals on the windows, doors and cash registers, hang a tin sign from the light pole in front of the gas stations and demonstrate how to handle the carbon copy paper work through the embosser which imprinted the card on their deposit slip.

This was one of my better summers, learned a lot, met a large number of business people and really started something that has become a hindrance to our national economy. Just think: if we would have not done this, the bankruptcy courts would have been far and few in between!


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