President Chain Store Corp (統一超商) yesterday announced a new bonus-point accumulation system for its “e-wallet” (electronic wallet) system, dubbed “icash,” aimed at customers who tend to make smaller transactions.
President Chain, the nation’s largest convenience store chain operator with more than 4,000 7-Eleven stores nationwide, said it expected the bonus-points system would help attract customers.
The company expects the number of icash members to grow from the current 5.8 million to 6 million by the end of the year, and projected that its sales would increase by 10 percent this year from a year ago.
It said experience gained from Japan showed that, in contrast with the stagnant Japanese credit card market, the “nanaco card” issued by Seven-Eleven Japan Co in April last year had become the most frequently used e-wallet within three months.
As a result of the credit card storm of 2006 and consumers’ budget concerns, President Chain said its card circulation in Taiwan had decreased by 1.35 million last month from a year ago.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
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