6
Thursday, March 21, 1974
University Dally Kansan
Hot Checks Burn Area Merchants
Students' bouncing checks are causing a dilemma for area merchants. Should the merchants maintain convenience for students and continue to lose money on bad checks occasionally or should they buy checks and lessen some student business?
"Hot checks are a problem to everyone," said Doug Sanderson, former manager of Flagship International Sandwiches, 618 W. 12th St., and manager of the Pub, 715 Massachusetts St. "There is no way of knowing who will write a bad check until the check comes back from the bank. Then it is usually too late."
Local merchants agree that hot-checks are received frequently, are hard to spot and even harder to track down when returned.
Although merchants are year-round victims of checks returned because of insufficient funds, the ends of semesters are especially bad.
Dennis Leslie, manager of Mr. Steak, 920 W.
23rd St., said.
"We would be money ahead if we stopped taking checks at the end of the school year,"
"We get burned mainly by closed accounts at this time. Students will close out their checking accounts and then go ahead and use the remaining checks they have. Usually there is no way of tracking these people down."
Sanderson said he was hit particularly hard in Denver when he was managing his team.
"I was getting about five checks back a day," he said. "Some people must have a hard time balancing their checkbooks around Christmas time.
"Some of it is unintentional, I think. People just don't realize how low their balance is. But some of it is intentional."
Methods of tracking down bad checks vary. Some merchants hire collection agencies. Some merchants hire attorneys to recover the check at a 50 per cent commission. Other merchants try to track down the students themselves.
"The easiest way to catch them is to nib them when they try to pass a second check," said Leslie. "Now I keep a file on all of them." If a guy tries a second time, I get him.
Sanderson said he experienced few problems at the Pub.
"I've only had two bad checks since we opened. On one of them, I called the guy and he came in and covered the check," he said. "On the other, the guy came in—himself he had received a notice from the bank that he was going to jail and he came in before I even called him."
Most merchants surveyed said the bad check problem wasn't confused to students. The university's admissions committee approve of some University efforts to control bad checks but only one merchant takes responsibility.
"If the University could put a hold on students' grades when they had reports of bad checks on that student, it would cut costs for the university," Leslie said. "That seems to work pretty well."
for University traffic fines and library fines.
"I bet we wouldn't get any bad checks from some dude who had been working eight years for, say, a doctorate, and on was thinking he'd think two before bouncing a check."
Sanderson said he thought area banks could cooperate better in decreasing the possibility of students' writing checks on closed accounts.
"If a student comes back from the summer and tries to open a new checking account, he should have to pay for any charge he may have on a closed account. Sanderson said."
KU Pharmacy to Continue Correspondence Courses
The University of Kansas School of Pharmacy plans to continue a sample correspondence course after receiving response from Kansas pharmacists.
Sample courses were mailed to about 2,500 registered Kansas pharmacists and more than 120 completed answer sheets were returned, according to J. A. Matchett, clinical instructor in pharmacy and designer of the course.
Matthett said that all of the respondents successfully scored at least 70 per cent on the first course, "Bacterial Diseases and Antibiotic Treatments." The course contained 10 pages of information, a 30-season test and an answer sheet. he said.
Another sample course, "Depression and
Anxiety," will be ready for distribution
on Saturday April 11.
The project was funded, Matchett said, by a grant to the KU Department of Pharmacy Practice from the Merck, Sharp and Dolbe Pharmaceutical Co., the Kansas Pharmaceutical Association and the Kansas State Board of Pharmacy.
Future courses, however, will be supported according to the School of Physics.
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