West Michigan Retailers Receive Early Christmas Bonus From Visa And MasterCard
Retailers Family Christian Stores Inc., Spartan Stores Inc. and MC Sports from West Michigan are going to be receiving checks amounting to more than $2.1 million. Throughout the state, 20,000 merchants will be receiving checks that total to $10 million.
The early holiday bonus is part of the landmark antitrust settlement payout of giant credit card companies MasterCard and Visa. The payout is going out to 634,000 merchants all over the U.S. and amounts to $1.1 billion.
National Retail Federation president and CEO Tracy Mullin says that the arrival of the checks couldn’t have been more timely. The checks are coming in at a time of great financial difficulty among retailers. With the checks, retailers will be able to position themselves so that they can take part of the economic recovery which lies ahead.
The National Retail Federation, among other grade groups, were class representatives in the lawsuit against MasterCard and Visa.
The law firm representing the retail industry in the legal battle was Constantine Cannon. Jeffrey Shinder, the managing partner of the law firm’s New York office said that, in class action history, the payouts being made by MasterCard and Visa may be the largest single payment to businesses ever. The checks the credit card giants will be issuing will range in amount from thousands of dollars to above $50 million. It depends on how much challenged fees the retailers paid.
Aside from the aforementioned West Michigan retailers, retail giants Lowe’s Cos., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other smaller retailers are also going to be receiving checks.
One retailer not included in the list is Meiger Inc. The retail chain is based in Walker and the company sued the credit card issuers separately. The company settled the its case against the card issuers a few years ago according to Stacie Behler, a spokeswoman for the company. She added that the terms of the settlement were quite favorable to their company, though she did not disclose just how much the company received for the settlement.
The payouts being distributed are representative of the final large-scale disbursement of the settlement amounting to $3.4 billion which was negotiated by Constantine Canon in 2003 after seven years of battling over the case in the legal arena. The payouts will accelerate the payment schedule which was set to be complete by 2012. Under the the terms of the deal, an earlier payment from the credit card companies will reduce their final payments.
