State tournament storms

I’ve heard that climate change is wreaking havoc on our planet, but it didn’t hit me until a couple weeks ago when the girls state basketball tournament was played without its customary blizzard.

Temperatures in Des Moines were in the mid to upper 60s the first week in March this year, a rebuke of decades of tradition when Iowa girls basketball teams and their fans braved snow storms to make it to the big dance in the capital city.

I figured, well, we’ll probably get hit by the storms when the boys played last week. More great weather.

It turns out that Old Man Winter was just running late this year. He finally showed up with a vengeance Sunday afternoon when the spring blizzard finally hit Iowa on Sunday afternoon into Monday morning.

But it was only a half-hearted storm. It was nasty enough, but with only a couple inches of snow falling, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been with winds gusting up to 60 miles per hour Sunday night.

I was kind of looking forward to it, because I’ve been itching to run my snowblower and have only used it three times this winter. We haven’t had a good snow for over two months. Brown ground and an open lake greeted the robins in the past two weeks who returned early from their winter vacation down south.

It was brutally cold Monday morning, with temps hovering just above zero. The filler cap to my car was frozen shut by the freezing rain that preceded the snow. But after sitting facing the sun, the filler cap opened up in the afternoon.

Old Man Winter ran out of town by Wednesday, and by the time you read this the snow will be gone and temps will be nearing 80.

We still have a few weeks to go, but winter seems mostly behind us now. And none too soon.

THE TICKETING process at the recent state high school basketball tournaments in Des Moines annoyed some fans.

You couldn’t walk up to the Casey’s Center box office the day of the game and buy a ticket, either with cash or a credit card. In the name of efficiency, you had to go online ahead of time and set up an account to buy a digital ticket that was sent to your cellphone.

It’s not just the state tournament. Many Iowa high schools have gone cashless for their athletic events. The Iowa High School Athletic Association claims it’s too much trouble to take cash and creates extra expenses. So they let an Ohio company handle all the sales online.

While the service is free to schools, it comes at a cost in the form of higher ticket prices. The company keeps part of the revenue to pay for its processing and credit card fees.

This practice annoyed legislators at the state capitol, too. A bill passed last week requires schools, as well as the boys and girls athletic associations, to accept cash among other payment options at school events. It awaits Gov. Reynolds’ signature.

It’s hard to understand why you would turn down cash from a customer standing at your box office after they’ve driven across the state to see their kids play in the state tournament. We may be old-fashioned, but we don’t turn down payments in any form at the Times Pilot. If someone wants to buy a subscription, an ad or an extra copy of the paper, we’ll take cash, credit card, money order, wire transfer, a fresh apple pie — whatever it takes to close the sale.

While some places don’t take cash, others don’t want credit cards, or at least discourage them. There are businesses as well as city, county and state agencies that impose extra fees on credit card sales.

Handling different forms of payment is a cost of doing business, and you should do whatever it takes to make the customer satisfied. If Grandma and Grandpa want to come to the state tournament and don’t want to mess with a cellphone to do it, figure out a way to sell them a ticket.

Does it cost money to handle cash? Sure. It also costs money to handle credit card transactions, but getting paid is the most important part of a business transaction.

I was talking to a newspaper publisher from eastern Iowa several years ago. He was annoyed because his biggest advertiser, a car dealer, insisted on paying for his advertising each month with a credit card. That way the dealer could receive reward points from the card. The publisher didn’t like paying the 3% credit card fees, but he knew it was a lot cheaper than losing his best customer.

The publisher was taking care of his customer.