In 1991, Citibank was the first credit card issuer to come up with a slimey scheme to defraud business owners; it was called The Price Guarantee Plan.  Without prior warning to the hundreds of thousands of businesses with which they had contracts (via the Visa/MasterCard Agreements), and in violation of those agreements, they announced with great publicity that they were going to save Citybank cardholders money.  As this plan unfolded in newspapers nationwide, Citibank announced that they guaranteed their cardholders the lowest price on goods purchased using a Citibank Visa or MasterCard account or they would refund the difference.

Within a certain time limit, if the same product was offered in an ad for less money, Citibank would guarantee the same price to the cardholder who purchased it elsewhere for more mony....but there was a small phrase at the end of the sentence that caught merchants off guard, and which most card users misunderstood, a clever con-man type of wording that said...even if the merchant won't!

In other words, they were offering discounts to entice Cibibank card holders to use plastic, while merchants could not offer discounts in order to encourage the use of cash as specifically stated in these sacred agreements.

We business-owners had not been notified in advance.  We, the businessowners, were suddenly involved but yet, had not been asked, consulted or advised that this was to take place and that we were part and parcel of it. Get the idea, they FIRST would send our customers back to us, the Retailers, to demand that refund (which we had not offered to make, and knew nothing about) and if we refused to do so, we were made out by Citibank to be the villains or louses who would not guarantee our customers the lowest prices, nor make a refund to our clients! 

It was one of the most devious schemes by a major corporation (especially a bank) that business owners had ever encountered.

Suddenly Citibank would become the White Knight to OUR own clients and customers if they made the refund when the business owners refused. It was clever and the nation's business writers fell for it hook, line and sinker, and helped Citibank clean up and add millions of cardholders to their customer base.  First, though, they tried to force US, the Independent Business owners to make the refund in their stead, a refund that THEY had guaranteed to make!  Real crooks, or the Mafia, think up schemes like that, so what would you call them?

As soon as I read it, it seemed easy to understand and see through it.  The domain of banking was once in the field savings or loans, and ours, as retailers was selling merchandise at a profit.  Now Citibank was invading our territory and trying to tell us what prices we should sell our merchandise.  Yes, fellow merchants saw no harm in it, but once an invader gets a foodhold, the rest is easy to forsee.

 ORDERING THE SIGN

That was the way they (Citibank) first double-crossed the trusting Merchants (Retailers) who had honored their cards in good faith for years!  Can you imagine, big shots, CEOs, CFOs, COOs and Presidents of a major banking corporations thinking like crooks?  Remember, this happened long before the collapse of ENRON!

Well, not that I'm such a great whiz at high-finance, but it seemed to me that everyone should immediately see through this damnable scheme, that it was an invasion of the merchants' territory, their perogatives, so I sat down and immediately wrote to the CEO at Citibank headquarters in New York, stating my objections. They didn't bother to answer my correspondence. In recent years though, large Corporations no longer seem to answer any correspondence from individuals, perhaps because they have so few people capable of doing so, or, as they grow in size, they become more arrogant and think of themselves as invincible.

How could one individual get their attention was my next thought, and using a sign in the window of my Gallery came to mind.  We had thousands of tourists passing by every week and it might bring some response, so my next step was to design and order the sign made, the sign pictured above..

FOUR VICE PRESIDENTS CALL ME IN TWO DAYS!  YEP, FOUR!  VISA, MASTERCARD, CITIBANK AND SANTA BARBARA BANK & TRUST.

Then I photographed the sign in my window and sent out just a single copy of it by FedEx to Richard E. Braddock, CEO of Citibank. Gadzooks, within 48 hours I had urgent personal calls and actual threats from Vice Presidents of Visa, MasterCard, and Citibank (while my good friends at my local bank, the SBB&T were forced to do the same at the insistence of all of the above).  Then this was followed up by a strong letter from Citibank's Chief Attorney, who was also a Citibank VP, which let me know that I was highly unpopular with them.

Before my sign was placed in the window no one would acknowledge my letter or calls, now I was on a first name basis with four VPs.  And then following that up, there was a personal letter from the President of Santa Barbara Bank and Trust, advising me that they would have to terminate my Acceptance Agreement if I did not remove the sign from my window. 

Trying to fight it, to gain some allies, the sign remained in my window (on Solvang's main street) for six weeks, where thousands of tourists could read it and many took the time to photographe it as well.
The local banks people kept checking on me and eventually they gave me an ultimatum, "Get that sign out of your window or we'll ruin you!" They didn't use those exact terms, of course, but the meaning was all too clear, for credit cards accounted for around 15% of my sales.

A Mafioso would have been a bit more direct, I guess, but I can't say they (Citibank, Visa and MasterCard) were too subtle; they could not allow anyone to step out of line, a rebel, or their scheme might collapse.

They did, however, during my talks with the Vice President of Citibank agree to eliminate the term "even if the merchant won't" in their future advertising. It proves, though, that "one person can make a difference".

The story did make it to the Wall Street Journal, but they did not mention the scheme because they did not see and understand my point of view.  (See article in Wall Street Journal).

THEN IT MADE THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:   

TILTING AT WINDMILLS.

It was nice being noticed, but I did not get the support from others that I was looking for, because I wanted other business owners to recognize the transformation that was taking place in the attitude of the Banks and Credit Card Cartel towards the Independent Business Owners. 

There was no support from my fellow merchants in Solvang, from the Directors of Chambers of Commerce in other cities to whom I had sent my pamphlets.  Not a word from members of congress either, in fact no one responded.  Visiting local stores and talking with them, I heard horror stories about what was happening, that  to them, but they simply accepted it without a murmur!  I could not beleive it, that they were afraid of Visa and MasterCard and these humongous banks!  They were willing to take The Royal Shaft, rather than make a united stand to express their objections to such an act of piracy by these lartge corporations, to force them to back down and stop the Air Miles and other forms of bribery.

Visa and MasterCard, along with the participating banks, sent out so many phony lying Press Releases that you'd have thought that there was a reincarnation of Hermann Goebbels, that Hitler's propaganda chielf was at the helm for this effort.  The papers sucked it up like sugar-free cola and reprinted every word sent out, word for word, verbatim.  There were no objections, no questions, no analysis of what it would do to the merchants who had been ensnared slowly over the years, but were now being enslaved to this new system.  Instead there was just meek acceptance from them, while the Financial columnists ate it up, devoured it, burped and then smiled.

My next step was to write a letter and send a copy to Financial Editor as well as every reporter on the Wall Street Journal, but I did not get a single reply.  To them, not only was I a befuddled old Don Quixote now, but most likely classified as a reaI nut case as well.  I guess it didn't help that my business and my office were located in a Square in Solvang, in which the oiutstanding landmark in town was located, a huge blue Windmill!