Wet, nothing but a trash can lid, squareup.com
Last night after work I attended the monthly running club board meeting. As the lengthy meeting was wrapping up some intense thunderstorms were rolling in. I got soaked just in the brief dash from the door to my truck. The drive home was pretty nasty with near blinding rain. I hit a couple patches of standing water on the road that sent 20 foot high plumes of water over the sidewalk.
When I got home I finished the soaking process as I removed the items from the truck and then stood in the rain with the dogs so they wouldn’t be afraid to pee. I then had to retrieve the one chair on the lanai that had blown into the pool. When I came back inside I stripped off my sopping wet shirt.
Our area really needed the rain so in the big picture it was a good thing. Unfortunately this storm was pretty nasty and knocked out power for over 30,000 people in the area. Luckily we were spared and kept the lights on the entire time.
I had a funny moment later in the evening. As I stepped into the shower and started getting wet I looked down and saw a cockroach. How nice. It was alive. I assumed it came out of one of the drains.
Well my no kill policy on living things even applies to cockroaches, at least in small numbers. I turned off the shower and stepped out to grab a tissue to snare the bug. For some reason, I didn’t feel like bothering to cover up since I was soaking wet. I walked through the house to the garage, naked. I planned to throw it outside.
Now of course I hadn’t lost all sensibility so I didn’t want to appear in my birthday suit for all to see in an inappropriate place like the garage. Before I hit the button on the opener I looked for something to cover up the important parts. That something turned out to be the lid to the trash can. I hit the button to the door, held the lid over my mid-section and threw the unwelcomed visitor outside into the rain before immediately closing the door. Ali was up in the office and was not witness to this oddity.
When I was reading this month’s Wired magazine I saw an article about a new company one of the Twitter founders created called squareup.com It is a service that is designed to make it incredibly easy for the normal Joe or small business to accept credit cards for payment of goods and services.
When I set up the Google checkout store for the running club I did a lot of investigation about credit card processing and merchant accounts. Setting up a merchant account required a bunch of steps and hassle. On top of the normal per transaction fee there are numerous additional ancillary charges including a flat monthly fee, minimum monthly transaction fees and a large cost for an actual CC reader. With Squareup, that all goes away.
They charge you a flat 2.75% of the transaction price if you swipe the card. If you are keying the data in the charge is 3.5% plus 15 cents, either way it is a sweet deal. On top of that they send you a free reader that works with an Iphone/Ipad and Android phones.
When you take a payment the money shows up in your bank account the next day for your first $1000 in monthly sales. Once you cross $1000 they hold the funds for 30 days which I assume is one way they can offer such low fees.
Signing up was incredibly easy. In the span of 5 minutes my account was created and verified. The verification process is pretty interesting. You enter your name, address, phone number and the last 4 of your SS number. You get verified by answering various questions based on your credit report.
The first application that came to mind for this service was for the running club. It could give us a way to accept credit card payments on the day of the race, something that has been requested by race participants on a consistent basis. Of course the situations this could come in handy are nearly infinite. Check it out yourself.