Abitab

What the hell is Abitab? Well if you've ever lived in Chicago you will know what a currency exchange is. For those who live their lives as much as possible in cash, a currency exchange is a way to pay your bills, register your car, buy money orders etc.

Abitab is a sort of currency exchange.

The postal service is not widely used by businesses to send their bills. I'm not sure why this is, all international mail I've ever received has resulted in a delivery of either the package or an invitation to go talk with customs about it... But there is little national mail traffic. The one company that sent me a bill via mail had to resend a copy twice for it to reach me.

It should also be noted that electricity, telephone, and water are government monopolies. None of those government monopolies use El Correo either - they have their own employees deliver their bills. Thus, this little country of less than 4 million people has four de facto postal services.

Ok so the bills labor-intensively arrive. How to pay them? Write a check and pop it in the mail? Nope. We've already established that popping anything in the mail is a good way to have it disappear. Now about that check part...

First of all, you probably won't get a checking account the first time you ask for one. You have to be an existing customer with a good history and good salary, and then its still a subjective decision. The accounts usually have fees associated with them and checks generally are accepted even less than credit cards. Fourth... no place wants your check... heck, most places don't want your credit card!

Abitab is also wired. Privacy issues aside, national ID cards can be handy. They can punch your number into their computer and properly credit your Visa card, your cable bill, your internet bill etc. The true geeks would scoff and say, oh, its just some kind of batch business process that just looks smart.... but they can look up your balance. (Which now makes me realize that they just have a version of EDI implemented and down pat, and probably a shocking amount of data about everybody replicated everywhere by modem... but it sometimes looks pretty "real time" when you're at the counter.)

So rather than mail checks or spend an hour with your financial software thats online with your bank, here you go to the ATM and get cash and then take that pile of cash with your pile of bills to Abitab. Your pile of bills is turned into a sort of blade runner meets arts and crafts project in front of your eyes as they scan two bar codes on each bill and then meticulously print two areas of the form front and back in a little printer, which is no small feat given that absolutely every form they handle is completely inconsistent from any other. It gets even more fun when you've printed your bar-coded payment slip for your Visa bill on the laser printer at the office and the form is then totally nonstandard and not even perforated, then they gotta get out a scissors.

When its all set and done they hand you back all the folded and printed receipts with your receipt for your points and maybe a little printout showing exchange rate information.

Why exchange-rate information? Because your credit card is one account with a limit set in pesos but tracks purchases in pesos and dollars at different interest rates. So when you pay your Visa bill you have not one minimum payment to make, but usually two if you have balances in both dollars and pesos. People are generally paid through peso-denominated savings accounts and take their money at ATM's - but even though the ATM's can dispense dollars and pesos, you can't withdraw dollars from your peso-denominated account on most of the machines.

And it takes the same hour you would have spent with m$ money... How 'bout that.