Costco customers will have to use a new credit card next year. The wholesaler failed to come to a new agreement with American Express. Costco shoppers will be able to use AmEx at its stores until December 31st – after that AmEx cards will no longer be accepted. With 88 stores across Canada, Costco is one of the country’s largest retailers. The negotiation breakdown comes as a blow to AmEx, who just recently launched two cash-back credit cards.
Photo via Mike Mozart CC BY 2.0
It’s been a busy week for Home Depot, who is currently in news headlines for all the wrong reasons. After last week’s blog post, we have further details on the credit card breach that occurred at Home Depot. The home improvement retailer confirmed a breach occurred at its 2,200 stores in the U.S. and 180 in Canada. Security firms have estimated as many as 60 million accounts could be affected and lead to as much as $3 billion in fraudulent charges.
With record-low borrowing costs, a lot of Canadians are indulging in consumer debt. Canadian consumers owed a whopping $1.44 trillion in debt in the second quarter of 2014, up from $1.42 trillion in the first quarter, according to credit monitoring agency Equifax Canada.
Are you guilty of living paycheque to paycheque? You’re not alone. More than half of employees (51 per cent) would find it difficult to meet their financial obligations if their paycheque were delayed by a single week, according to a recent survey by the Canadian Payroll Association (CPA). That figure is up 2 per cent from an average of 49 per cent in the last three years. With home prices reaching the stratosphere in many cities and households taking on record debt levels, this is an especially worrisome trend.
Small businesses are faced with a difficult and costly decision when it comes to credit cards: offer credit cards as a method of payment and eat the costly transaction fees that come up with, or only offer debit and cash and risk losing customers. It’s a lose-lose situation for small businesses. After another month of dismal job numbers, it’s small businesses that are the lifeblood of our economy.
It’s hard to flip open a newspaper without reading about another major data breach. Earlier this year we saw the biggest internet security breach in history. The Heartbleed bug left the passwords of up to 66 per cent of all Internet accounts vulnerable and led to 900 SINs being stolen from Canada Revenue Agency.
