Canadian Tire Bank is at the top of the chart? | Canadian Tire | Discussion forum

davidgeorge said
What a surprise. Canadian Tire Bank is on top of HISA chart with 1.8% interest rate.
  

Yeah, it won't last. When it, and MAXA Financial, drops, it'll drop hard (by at least 30 bps, by my own logical supposition and reasonable speculation). It, MAXA Financial, and Bridgewater Bank tend to be laggards, or trailing indicators, in the HISA rate race chase. 😉

Cheers,
Doug

I just read a few days ago that they could be soon extinct.

Cdn Tire has recently resumed sending flyers to my house every week. No other company has joined them - yet.

smayer97 said
Well that's a tall tale...given the response from CEO Hicks. That said, keep in mind that technically, the retail chain is a separate company than the financial services.  

Yeah, I don't think Canadian Tire will go extinct, but they could very see further cannibalization of their business by e-commerce retailers and thereby consumers pulling back on discretionary purchases. One could argue the financial services business is potentially more vulnerable in that consumers may still make purchases at Canadian Tire, but finance them a lot less. This, in turn, leads to lower financing requirements, and thus lower (for very much the long term) GIC and HISA rates going forward. They could also decide to allow Scotiabank to buy the remaining 51% stake in the business (by essentially taking the cash and running through full monetization of their financial services business), which Scotia likely would wind up or merge Canadian Tire Bank into either of (a) ADS Canadian Bank or (b) The Bank of Nova Scotia. Either way, this bank is headed back to the bottom in terms of HISA and GIC rates.

Cheers,
Doug

Loonie said
If I had a Cdn Tire CC, which I don't, I would be using up my accumulated points in a timely way. They are useless for anything else except merchandise in the Cdn Tire chains. You can't even buy their gas with them.

If things get bad enough, they could get swallowed by Lowe's or Home Depot. Look what happened to Rona, Aikenhead's. . . (Canadian companies).  

Loonie, all good points (no pun intended, honestly!), as usual. I'm not sure Lowe's is in a position to take on an acquisition of Canadian Tire, but wouldn't rule out Home Depot taking a run at them. I actually kind worry that Canadian Tire might try and bulk up by expanding into home furnishings and buying Leon's Furniture Ltd. That's a great Canadian company, generally well run, and focuses on a specific niche. While it'd make a larger Canadian company, I worry that the Leon's/The Brick corporate culture would be lost.

Another possibility: Amazon.com, Inc., may decide to eventually buy Canadian Tire Corporation, Ltd., as a way to expand their local e-commerce pick-up locations. They'd really improve CTC's e-commerce platform, as much as CTC has supposedly already improved it. And, there's potential asset sales they could do (i.e., Helly Hansen, which doesn't seem to be working out for CTC and seems to be more of a vanity acquisition by management).

Cheers,
Doug

Disclosure: I am a unitholder in CT REIT, which is CTC's largest landlord and which CTC holds a controlling stake in.

Loonie said
You can't even buy their gas with them.

If things get bad enough, they could get swallowed by Lowe's or Home Depot. Look what happened to Rona, Aikenhead's. . . (Canadian companies).  

if they are dumb enuf to let someone redeem their CT money for gas, then they would have been out of biz long time ago.

Even if things get bad, they wont get swallowed, or need to be swallowed.

People worry about their CC biz but even that is not bad enuf to "bring them down" if custie credit goes down the drain.

Loonie said
What's wrong with redeeming for gas?
You can redeem AirMiles at Shell for gas.  

The margin on gas is way lower than merchandise that you earn the CT money from.

Look at the earn rate on AirMiles vs earn rate for CT money. CT money much easier to earn. At Shell, your normal earn rate is 1 AM per $20 I think, look at how many cars u need to fill before u earn even 95miles to redeem $10. Even at 10X promotion date, earn rate is still lower I believe.

As Loonie said, Air Miles earn rate can be VERY high if you are smart, like getting them during promos... During MegaMiles, earn rate can easily be 300%, no, not a math error; you can actually earn MORE than you spend, e.g. spend $30 and earn 1000 miles (= over $105 worth). And many other promos can easily earn 10%; spend $500, earn 500 miles (= over $52).

Though CT could allow redeeming rewards for gas, they already do give 5$/L or more if you use their credit card (which at current gas prices works out to over 5%; even at last year's prices, it is still at least 4%). And the goal is to get you into their store to use them so they "earn back" the rewards by your and my spending there.

Do remember that there is no free lunch... all these programs are paid for by you and me (and subsidized by every one else not using these programs) because they bake the cost into the price of their goods...

Easy to see... just compare pricing from places with no reward programs vs those that do...they are higher...e.g. gas stations, merchandise retailers, etc.

So if you want to benefit CT rebates on gas, use their CC.

smayer97 said
During MegaMiles, earn rate can easily be 300%, no, not a math error; you can actually earn MORE than you spend, e.g. spend $30 and earn 1000 miles (= over $105 worth). And many other promos can easily earn 10%; spend $500, earn 500 miles (= over $52).
 

I have done all the megamiles (and quite safe to say and optimized it in every way possible) last 2 years but prob skip this year cuz it just sucks for what they offer in Ontario. Love to hear how u spend $30 and earn 1000 miles. Look at the megamiles and enlighten me how you can get the earn rate u described (I have already done all the freebies like signed up for autoconvert HBC, etc etc, yes done all those previous years).

Megamiles only happens twice a year, while CT earn are 365 days a week, so that is really comparing apples to oranges.

@savemoresaveoften Like Loonie said, Air Miles promos often involve little spending extra above what I would normally spend. For this Megamiles promo, it looks like my combo to get the 1000 miles will be: Shell, LCBO, Rona, Foodland, and using my Air Miles BMO card (which I already have) until I reach the $500 spend over the next 4 weeks...already almost halfway there (which will earn an additional 500 Air Miles)...easy peasy.

ALL of these are places we would normally shop, except Foodland...but that is close enough that it may be worth the trip, since in the end it would mean that I would spend $0 dollars over and above what I normally do at these places but get almost $160 back in Air Miles for doing it. So in this case, my return is infinite 😀

Does not always work out that way... one of the recent megamiles I could not pull this off but in MOST of them it has been this way.