THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

their goods. CUC presents that information in a palatable way to
consumers who can buy at the wholesale price, plus shipping costs.
When a shopper buys something, the manufacturer is notified and
ships it directly to the customer. CUC makes its money, not from the
merchandise, but mostly from membership fees ($69 per year) and
from the vast amount of transaction information it accumulates.
CUC also launched a series of specialised on-line services:
Travellers Advantage (a full-service travel agency), AutoAdvantage
(purchase and maintenance of can), Premier Dining (the first national
discount dining programme), BookStacks (on-line book purchases),
MusicSpot (CDs), and Shoppers' Advantage (a general on-line
merchandising service that, by 1993, had 50 million members buying
from a database of more than 250,000 products). CUC also acquired
successively: Madison Financial Corporation (now FISI Madison, the
world's largest financial marketing organisation), Benefit Consultants
(insurance), Entertainment Publications publisher of discount books),
Sierra On-line (a software firm) and a large European licensee.
Forbes also made deals with America On-line, Prodigy,
CompuServe, Citibank, Sears, and other similar 'brand names' to
provide their on-line Shopping services. So without any CUC
publicity (on-line or otherwise), and with all shipping being handled
directly from the manufacturer, most customers have no idea that
they ever dealt with CUC. Total sales volumes don't even have to be
reported because they are directly credited to the manufacturers or
service suppliers.
HFS comes from a totally different world, except that most of its
customers are just as ignorant of its existence as are those of CUC. It
was founded in the early 1990s by Henry Silverman. The story began
when he engineered the acquisition of the hotel chain licences of
Ramada Inn and Howard Johnson. For these, $170 million was paid,
and for Days Inn, B295 million. They became a publicly owned