BBVA Compass, the U.S. arm of the Spanish Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentina, faces a lawsuit from irate customers and their attorneys over its overdraft policies. In the lawsuit filed earlier this week, Houston restaurant Fat Butter has accused BBVA of deceptive practices, including posting debits out of order to increase overdraft fees.
 
A specific excerpt from the lawsuit claims that BBVA posted a large debit first so that it could claim overdraft fees and then posted several smaller debits, even though these transactions were not made in this chronological order. The attorney for Fat Butter has stated that these practices are …read more

It hardly makes sense on the surface that a business would resort to raising prices to see itself through a deep recession and weak consumer spending, but that is exactly what Starbucks plans to do. While several basic drinks may now be less expensive, Starbucks has already started raising prices on specialty drinks in several stores.
 
By the end of the year, the price adjustments should already be affecting Starbucks stores nationwide, placing Starbucks firmly in the difficult position of balancing its brand with its customers’ desires to save money. Competition from the likes of McDonald’s, which recently started selling espresso …read more

Few restaurants are quite as closely associated to America as McDonald’s, but interestingly enough, McDonald’s is currently thriving much more in other parts of the world. What’s more, McDonald’s has reported that growth continues to slow in the United States, perhaps signaling a shift in attention for the restaurant chain.
 
Unfortunately for McDonald’s, overall sales were down 0.4 percent in the month of May, mostly attributable to the strengthening dollar. However, U.S. stores have seen a general decline in growth, with May of last year bringing in a 4.3 percent increase in sales while this year, sales only increased 2.8 percent. …read more

Your small restaurant is building a classy reputation – the name of the restaurant is Wilkin’s (after your pretend last name… trust me).   Recently, there was another restaurant on the news that wouldn’t let handicapped people in or make their establishment handicapped-accessible because they weren’t “part of their target market.”  This put the media in a frenzy and everyone within 200 miles knows of that problem.  No concern, right?  HA!  Wrong – their restaurant is called Wilkin’s Family Restaurant.  Though most people know the difference, there has been an obvious decrease in traffic to your restaurant (minus the occassional idiot …read more

There are only three things that matter in the restaurant business – location, location, location.  How many times have you heard that one?  I think the first two “location”s make some sense… but it doesn’t emphasize the fact that if you build an electronics store in the middle of New York City, you can’t get away with selling only VCR’s (who still uses those?).  Similarly, you can’t design a product without being thorough.
One of my roommates attended a presentation with an entrepreneur who developed a device that would send text messages, play music, and other stuff through a special service …read more