Originally Posted by tline
"UA can't complain. They got an interest free loan of $12,309.03 for a few days."
Actually they lose a few hundred dollars. They probably pay a fee of 1-2% to process the credit card transaction. When they issue the credit, they do not get this fee reversed.
Simply wrong. You can get a merchant account from CostCo that would reverse most of the percentage charge for a refund; with their volume, I'm sure UA pays nothing but a transaction fee, probably under $.25, in a situation such as this.
Of course, it's more likely the credit card processor gets more advantage from the float than UA... for a small merchant, even good processors do not process the payment to your checking for several days, and the advantage would be erased. Again, I would suspect that UA has arranged better terms.