Wal-Mart may begin offering mortgages

[IDemo]

Report: Retailer renegotiated leases with its in-store banks

MSNBC News Services
Updated: 36 minutes ago

NEW YORK - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. renegotiated leases with banks in its stores so the discount retailing giant can offer mortgages, home-equity lines of credit and consumer loans, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

One of the leases gives Wal-Mart permission to offer debit cards and investment and insurance products, either directly or through a third-party vendor.

Wal-Mart said the lease language does not signal anything new because the company has already been offering services such as check cashing, money transfers, branded credit cards and bill payments.

Wal-Mart's efforts to enter the banking business in the U.S. have met opposition.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17626678/

[hippiechick]

1. Potterville, here we come ....

:puke:

[IDemo]

2. oops, dupt post...

[Raven]

3. God help us all! n/m

[AlCzervik]

4. i'll stop by after i finish my estate planning at Target.

[MissB]

12. .

:rofl:

[karlrschneider]

5. You'll owe your soooooulll

to the company store.

:puke:

[MLFerrell]

6. That old West Virginia coal-mining song comes to mind...

"I sold my soul to the company store..."

[NMMNG]

8. Precisely what I was thinking

:scared:

[jmowreader]

7. Welllllll...

I'd bet a nickel that this is all going to be through a "third-party vendor," and not something Wal-Mart does itself.

Let's go WAY out on a limb here and point out that this could be the first step toward a Wal-Mart Realty and a Wal-Mart Moving and Storage.

Okay, check it out: You've got the world's largest retailer. Each of their stores has a satellite dish on the roof. And they've got massive amounts of ready capital. If they had a mortgage business in-house, they could completely change the way homes are bought and sold.

Check this shit out: Pretend you have had it up to HERE with your community. If you decide to move somewhere else, you must:

figure out where to move to

fly down there and find a new job

fly back down there and find somewhere to live

come back and either:
sell your house to a flipper, taking a big bite in the process because flipping doesn't exactly lend itself to buying high
hire someone to renovate your home, then sell it, but that's expensive
or fix up your place enough to sell, but that's time-consuming

then call a moving company to take your possessions to your new home

Wal-Mart could sell you the whole thing, except for your job hunt, as a package.

[karlrschneider]

9. Maybe even get a round-trip ticket on Air Wally World

:eyes:

[jmowreader]

11. That's another third-party-vendor product

Wal-Mart wouldn't start an airline. That business has variables they can't control.

Wal-Mart can't set the price of fuel. (This is why most Wal-Marts that have gas stations in front of them have "Murphy USA" stations, not "Wal-Mart" stations--they let a third-party vendor deal with the fluctuations.) I know about fuel hedging. I also know about Force Majeure.

Airplanes occasionally quit flying before you want them to. If a Sam's Air airliner went down you know every instapundit in America who's within five miles of a television camera would be in front of one wondering whether Wal-Mart's "aggressive business practices" were the root cause of the catastrophe. (This would happen even if something that obviously has no connection to maintenance, like a midair collision, caused the crash.) Naturally, Lee Scott, Wal-Mart's CEO, would have to rebut all this horseshit..."no, the fact that we dictate prices to our suppliers has NOTHING to do with the fact that Dick Cheney shot the plane down while he was hunting ducks with Antonin Scalia, Harry Whittington and a fucking Antiaircraft Gun."

Oh yeah...the Bush family's business partners are still around.

I've also been told there's a shortage of terminal gates at airports all across America.

What Wal-Mart WOULD do, OTOH, is to use its purchasing power to negotiate discounted fares with airlines.

On edit: Karl knows this shit already; this is for the rest of y'all.

[karlrschneider]

13. LOL.........good one.

:D

[geardaddy]

10. So, they plan on selling mortgages

created by child labor in Bangladesh?

;)