Avoid This List! A Good Reason for Balancing the Checkbook
By JESSIE ROYCE HILL
The daughter of a well known Island family had already bounced two
checks to Shirley's Hardware when its owner, Jesse Steere, spotted
her shopping among the nuts and bolts with her father one day.
Mr. Steere decided to confront her about the $96.89 she owed.
"She told me she'd been living in New York and
hadn't gotten a chance to pay it," Mr. Steere recalled.
"But even people who live in New York have to pay their
bills."
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/01/16/content/jesse_steere_sm.jpg" But this Islander turned New Yorker never did, and having her father
present, laughing and shaking his head, did not help Mr. Steere recoup
his loss as the owner had hoped it would.
Having failed with the reminder phone calls and the in-store chat,
Mr. Steere tried a new tack. He put the woman's name on a list
under the heading "Bounced Checks," and laminated it to the
counter top, facing the customers. You can't miss it when you
bring your merchandise to the register: Fifteen names and the delinquent
amounts owed by each are visible for all to see. Which is precisely the
point.
Shirley's Hardware began posting this list a couple of years
ago when the store's books were brimming with bounced checks from
Islanders. As a result of the public outing, Mr. Steere said the list
- with check amounts ranging from $20 to $100 - is now a
third the size.
Shirley's Hardware is not alone in this practice.
Cronig's has a publicly posted bounced checks list of its own. The
grocery store's comptroller, Ken Robinson, attributed his
list's effectiveness to what he calls "the embarrassment
factor."
The aim is not to punish one-time offenders, Mr. Steere and Mr.
Robinson insisted, but to solve a recurrent business problem by
appealing to the small community they serve.
"Sometimes a customer has a problem and can't pay us
right away and we work something out," Mr. Steere said. "I
try to be understanding. But if they're out having steak dinners,
then why don't they pay their bills?"
Mr. Steere, who helped build the store he has worked in for 30
years, has spent a great deal of time trying to track down the people
who owe him. He's got the ledgers to prove it, with notes like
"left another message, phone disconnected, no response"
scrawled next to the bad checks of the names in his file. At one point
he employed a collection agency to help, as well as the Tisbury police
department. But the posted list seems to work better.
"We don't put you on the list until we've tried to
reach you, left messages, sent letters," said Mr. Steere.
"The sad, weird part is that some of these people are friends of
mine. They tell me they didn't realize it because there are plenty
of checks left in their book. I guess people don't balance their
books. What do you do?"
One of the things Island stores do is share their lists, apprising
one another of chronically neglectful customers. "It's a
service to other merchants, as well as ourselves," said Mr.
Robinson of Cronig's, whose list includes the name, check number
and amount of each bad check, along with a running tally, currently over
$13,000, owed the store.
"It especially becomes a problem now, after the
holidays," noted Mr. Robinson, "when Islanders have spent
their summer earnings and haven't put anything away for the
winter."
Cronig's, too, is willing to work with those who have come
into hard times, but customers who have bounced a check will be added to
the list within a month, and there the names remain until the balance
is paid in full.
Unlike the smaller Shirley's Hardware, Cronig's is able
to use its sophisticated computer system to automatically lock out
account numbers from which bad checks have been written. Its list is
therefore intended purely as an alert to the Island community, a way of
encouraging customers to pay up and not make the mistake again.
In some instances the public shaming leads to acts of charity. Mr.
Steere recalled a man who saw his neighbor's name on the list and
paid her bill. "He told me, ‘She's a nice lady,
she's just having a hard time.'"
The Tisbury police department views the public list as a good
preventive measure. Since Cronig's and Shirley's Hardware
began employing the tactic, "other stores have contacted us about
their bad checks more than those," said police chief Theodore
Saulnier.
Still, some stores frown upon the embarrassment factor. Reliable
Market's bookkeeper Jennifer Freeman said she wouldn't post
a bounced check list for customers to see. "That's very
personal," she said. "It's an invasion of
privacy."
Merchants acknowledge that checks are gradually becoming less common
as debit cards replace them. But small communities perhaps hang on
longer to customs, and many Islanders are accustomed to writing checks
without being asked for identification or even a phone number.
Mr. Steere tries to impress upon customers that it is a privilege to
write a check, rather than a right. He hopes his list makes the point.
"Stealing is the worst thing you can do to me," he said.
"And bouncing checks is stealing."
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