Reported by Star-Bulletin staff & wire
Tuesday, December 24, 1996
Reported by Star-Bulletin staff & wire
Tuesday, December 24, 1996
Hawaii consumers are opening up their checkbooks at a brisk pace as the holiday season comes to a close. Isle check purchases up
as season nears endHouston-based TeleCheck Services Inc., a check clearance company, said today that the dollar amount of checks written in Hawaii in the first 24 days of the shopping season were up 6.6 percent compared with check sales at the same stores during the same time last year. Hawaii's performance tops the national gain of 5.7 percent, the company said.
The latest survey, which covers sales from the day after Thanksgiving through Sunday, was also better than the 3.4 percent increase in Hawaii check sales that TeleCheck reported in its previous survey, which covered the shopping season through Dec. 15.
TeleCheck says that check purchases account for about a third of U.S. retail transactions. However, isle retailers and economists have said check purchases don't fully reflect the level of sales since most purchases are made with credit cards and cash.
BALTIMORE - The Machinists union has sued Walt Disney Pictures for $50 million, claiming its movie "Ransom" damaged the labor group's reputation. Machinists union
sues Disney over ‘Ransom’The lawsuit accuses Disney of associating the 700,000-member union, formally known as the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, with "despicable criminal activities and gross violations of its duties to its members."
In the film, Mel Gibson stars as Tom Mullen, the wealthy owner of Endeavor Airlines, whose son is kidnapped and held for a $2 million ransom. Mullen is pegged by the kidnappers as an easy mark after paying $250,000 to a corrupt "Machinists Union" official to prevent an airline strike.