Nothing personal, just business...Should we stop accepting the American Express card?

I got a $5400 bill the other day from American Express.

$5400 for one month.

Why? Its their fee for allowing us to accept AMEX at the business--and its not right.

When we process an AMEX card for a client, we don't see the funds for at least four business days. That is four days that American Express gets our funds--interest free.

In contrast, when I run a Visa or Mastercard transaction, our funds post to our account at midnight the next business day. And our rates are about 32% less.

So, if I have this straight--I am paying a huge premium for a large corporation to take advantage of us by getting a short-term interest free loan.

Its not as if small businesses haven't had run-ins with American Express before over other issues. Do a Google search on all the small business credit lines that they are drawing down:

American Express reduces small business credit lines

My question is this: Should we draw down on American Express?

American Express--if you are listening--I suggest you call me ASAP. You have a very dissatisfied customer.

Torrey

(916) 760-0032

Update: Lots of angry people responding to this New York Times article

Annual Silverado Fire Sale

Its time for another famous Silverado Fire Sale!

We updated our Fire Sale page here for 2008:

http://tinyurl.com/33z2uo

We have a ton of new and used gear that needs to go before we begin the transition over to our new facility in Historic Old Folsom in 2009:

Silverado 950si SCRATCH CPU (demo machine)
Apple Mac OS X Leopard (overstocked - new copies)
AJA IO HD (demo machines)
Panasonic displays (new LCD's and demo plasmas)
Apple Mac Pro's (demo machines)
Apple MacBook Air (demo machine)
Apple Cinema Displays (demo machine)
Apple MacBook Pro (brand new--overstock item)
Dulce RAID (demo item)
Silverado Fieldmaster (demo system)
Sony JH3 Compact HDCAM (demo system)
Tangent Devices CP100 (demo system)

Prices range for 11% to almost 70% off.

Also--we've released a new Twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/silveradosys

All new updates will now be pushed to Twitter first and then to our blog.

One note--the site is triggered to sell first come, first served. Once an item is sold, it will no longer appear on the Fire Sale page.

Torrey
-----------------------------------------------
Torrey Loomis
President & CEO - Silverado Systems, Inc.
Outfitter to the World's Foremost Apple Professionals
2600 East Bidwell Street, Suite 280
Folsom, CA 95630
(916) 760-0032 • FAX (916) 404-5258
tloomis@silverado.cc
http://www.Silverado.cc