Walker wrote >>
Anyone have any thoughts on this? I've heard some business owners complain about higher charge fees with AmEx, so I wasn't sure if this was something too beneficial for every type of small business...
Curious is anyone is participating or what the general consensus on this program is...
Seems like a pretty win-win idea , unfortunately I didn't find out about it until the deadline was pretty much past so we were not able to participate this year. AmEx didn't do anyone any favors by waiting to announce this to retailers and their cardholders at nearly the last minute.
as for the higher fees and whatnot that comes with accepting AMEX cards, I agree completely with @thecandlelab it doesn't bother me at all. For us the fees usually are balanced out by the much higher average ticket we historically receive from Amex cardholders and the cash flow issues are pretty easy to navigate. And we certainly want to make it as convenient as we reasonably can for people to shop with us.
But every type of retail is unique (and in some cases wildly different) and what is true for us may not be true for other more niche retailers and other places that take cards. e.g. I could certainly see food trucks and other very small food vendors really being impacted very negatively by Amex's fees, since in many cases there simply isn't higher tickets to be had given what they sell.
Unlike some of the other comments I actually really liked the fact that SBS was the Saturday after black Friday, simply because that's also OSU/Michigan gameday. Our footraffic always takes a good sized hit during "The Game" for completely understandable reasons so anything to help address that is welcome indeed. I certainly understand the whole shopping event fatigue thing as well, this time of year there is a ton of unavoidable event noise.
if they do SBS again next year we'll likely participate. Hopefully Amex will give us much more advance notice next year. :)