South Kingstown Chamber will honor gift certificates
3:03 PM Mon, Mar 09, 2009 | Permalink
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SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. _ The South Kingstown Chamber of Commerce announced that it will honor all local gift certificates despite the collapse last week of the national company responsible for processing the payments. "Even though it means that we end up paying twice, this is something we want to do to keep people shopping locally, support our businesses and make sure that people don't lose faith in their Chamber of Commerce," Lisa Roy, interim director of the organization said. Roy made the statement after an emergency morning meeting of the chamber's board of directors. She estimated that the chamber purchased about $7,000 worth of the gift certificates -- redeemable at local businesses and restuarants -- between November and December of last year. Last week, CertifiChecks, an Ohio-based company that handled gift certificates for corporations across the country, abruptly announced that it was liquidating. The chamber's board of directors decided to honor the certificates to protect shoppers and businesses alike. Participating merchants are being asked to accept the gift certificates, but instead of depositing them in the bank, redeem them at the South Kingstown Chamber of Commerce office, 230 Old Tower Hill Road, in Wakefield. "We will pursue matters with CertifiCheck as a chamber," Roy said. "We'll deal with any legalities and the question of whether there's any way to attach our funds. "In the meantime we wanted to keep propelling shopping in our community." After receiving a letter from CertifiChecks last week , Roy tried to access the chamber's account on the Internet without success. As a result, the chamber has no idea how many certificates are outstanding or how much of the $7,000 was spent. The terse message on the company's Web site leaves it unclear whether consumers who purchased the certificates or merchants who accepted them as cash, would get their money back. Representatives of chambers of commerce across the state, last week decried the abrupt failure of CertifiCheck as a painful blow to "shop local" programs that had worked well in promoting retail traffic in different areas. Many of the larger chambers were not affected because they do not use region-specific gift certificates, while others -- such as North Kingstown, Newport County, East Greenwich and Westerly -- counted themselves as fortunate because they ran their programs in-house. Roy said South Kingstown is probably the hardest hit by the CertifiCheck collapse, because the chamber bought the gift certificates in advance and then sold them directly to consumers. Roy explained that it worked like a bank account, with the money from the chamber held in a designated account by CertifiCheck and then drawn on whenever a certificate was used. With the chamber's, the certificates can be used at more than 200 retailers, restaurants, grocery stores and service businesses in the South Kingstown area. 
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