I just got a cup of coffee from an unnamed restaurant, and was stunned to find it was $1.84 pre-tax (and not a designer coffee or Starbucks)!  Since I did not have that much change, I paid with a debit card.  With a background in restaurant management before I settled into geek-hood, I immediately began analyzing this.

The Food-COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) for a cup of coffee is generally accepted to be ~$.05-$.12 per 8 ounces so this cup would be generously valued at $.24 to produce.   So far, we're good at a gross revenue of 83%.  But wait, its time to put it on the good-old credit card.... for the sake of argument lets say it doesn't matter about the question of credit vs/ debit card - we'll assume a transaction fee of $.25 and 2.2% transaction for a total of $.29.  That in turn means that the COGS just more than doubled to $.53 or 34%!!!  Of course they are not going to just eat that cost-of-credit - they have smart people who crank their averages (I know - I used to do it!) to figure out what those transaction-fees are going to be and then adjust their whole menu-mix accordingly - what that means is whether you pay cash-or-credit, you're paying for everyone else's credit purchases!

So the next time you order that cup-'o-joe, don't forget to mentally prepare yourself for the extra .25 for all of us using plastic - its not bad, but for small products, the transaction outweighs the product!

 We were working with a client on an HTML email issue where the main content of the email was "missing" (invisible).  The underlying HTML code was malformed but still contained the main content (which contained confidential data - but was sent by a 3rd party thank goodness)  and reminded us of something very important: that HTML (or any other code) can mask or hide important/confidential information.  It is therefore our highest recommendation that emails should always be sent in text-only form for really secure installations and/or transmissions.  

Lets face it, most people (including IT folks) don't look at the underlying code of an email any more than they look at their digital-pictures for encoded messages in the pixels (a romanticized-if-not-popular spy tactic).  At least spot -checking your businesses outgoing emails for HTML issues is good practice if not banning altogether.