Credit

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you just what an expensive hobby film collecting was and trust me Derann, Walton and the other 8mm distributors were not raking in a fortune! By the time the cost for the rights for a title, the master material, the royalty for each print, the negative cost, the recording and maintenance of all the various equipment, as well as the advertising, labels and packaging… and not forgetting the cost of the print itself, there wasn’t a lot left. We well understood this was an obstacle that needed to be overcome and so we were forever trying to find ways of making it easier for our customers to buy those expensive full features or bundles of shorts. As early as 1982 we were offering credit facilities to spread the cost of buying the films. The company we used was ‘LoanMaster’ and it was only partly successful as they often turned down even our most trusted customers, and later they withdrew the facility of HP on the films and would only offer it on electrical goods. We then decided to have a go at doing it ourselves asking the customer to send in 6 or 10 post dated cheques (each cheque date one month later than the previous one), or their credit card details. We would then send the film and present the cheques, one every month or make a monthly credit card charge, but there were so many bounced cheques or credit card refusals, that we gradually turned this system into what we called ‘The Lay-Away Scheme’! However before this system could be started I had one of my very few encounters with an irate and very unpleasant customer! I had been manning phone that morning and had been unfortunate enough to pick up the phone to a gentleman who was threatening to take us to court because he hadn’t a cheque book or credit card and was therefore unable to take advantage of the HP we offered. He wanted us to send him the film he required and then said then he could send us some cash or postal orders every month. But we couldn’t offer this service for obvious reasons and he began to use some very strong and profane language over the phone, to which I said that unless he stopped his tirade I was going to end the call and hang up, but this only made him worse, he ended the call stating that we would be hearing from him or lawyers again very soon….. of course that never happened, but it was not something I would like to have been through again. Anyway back to the main story, we began ‘The Lay-Away Scheme’ which was the easiest system so far and simply meant that the customer built up the money by sending in regular payments until there was sufficient to pay for item wanted, all we asked was that payments were regular and that the length of time taken to build was no more that 24 months….. this was normally met with ease and only very rarely was there a problem. For ‘Gone With The Wind’ and most of the titles with longer running times we even offered to let them be purchased on a reel by reel basis.