Word: plastics
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...willing to pay an average fee of 3.2% per purchase (as compared with 2% for Visa and MasterCard). A chastened Amex has now chopped its vendor fee to 2.8%, and the ploy seems to be working. Since 1992, the company has moved boldly into / establishments regarded by consumers as plastic-essential, including -- choke on this, yuppie scum! -- Sears and K Mart. This year alone, AmEx expects to sign more than 200,000 new businesses...
...American Express, whose recent ads have featured Jerry Seinfeld musing adenoidally about what the company has referred to in less lighthearted moments as the "evils of debt trap." AmEx's own maiden voyage into revolving credit -- with the launch of the Optima card in 1987 -- resulted in a plastic meltdown. The program quickly racked up $1.5 billion in unpaid charges, a figure twice the industry average, according to Robert McKinley, president of RAM Research Corp. Since March 1992, when the loss rate peaked at 12%, AmEx has wrestled bum credit to less than 6%, well in line with the industry...
...even such battle-hardened successes do not assure victory for AmEx in its quest to reclaim the top standing it lost in 1989 in the $562 billion credit-card industry. The U.S. market is saturated with 1 billion pieces of plastic, issued by 6,500 companies. "Industry competition has turned into quite a fray," says Mark Tonnesen, president of credit-card services for Bank One in Columbus, Ohio. "The winner in all of this is the consumer." Even AmEx's Skillern acknowledges that "the world probably doesn't need a new credit card," though he remains confident that "consumers will...
...competition has grown so fierce for two reasons: the pool of potential new customers is shrinking at the same time America's plastic habit is growing. Since 1984, outstanding charges rung up on bank cards have swollen from $53 billion to $239 billion. "At some banks, 50% to 60% of their equity is based on the credit-card business," says industry watchdog McKinley. Analysts say that although no more than 20% of all purchases are currently made with plastic, the possibilities for growth are enormous. Some card vendors have already moved into such traditional cash domains as movie theaters...
...female executive is so pleased with her mnemonic techniques for remembering names ("bimbo -- Fran!") that she can't understand why her underlings hate her. A group of tight-faced suburban matrons discuss their plastic surgery. ("Was it painful?" "No, darling, it was Silverman.") A women's book club meets every week to discuss the same novel, The Bridges of Madison County. The group's leader has restyled her hair and wardrobe to look like Francesca, the farm wife who has a torrid affair in the book with a magazine photographer. The others are just as far gone. "You know...