You can buy stock at the supermarket

Post Staff
August 6, 2016
The stock market is coming to your local grocery store — and it’s not charging wholesale prices.
Stockpile, which sells stock through gift cards, is going to roll out in about 14,000 stores by the end of the year — bucking the race to the bottom in brokerage fees by charging as much as 20 percent in fees.
Stockpile is a full-service brokerage with a twist — it sells fractional shares of some of the biggest and most well-known companies in the world, like Apple, Facebook and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
While most brokers operate purely online or through phone orders, Stockpile sells these pieces of shares on gift card racks, alongside ones for Starbucks, TGI Fridays and Subway. Customers buy a card at a certain fixed price, then enter a code online in a brokerage account, and voila — they’re shareholders.
Stockpile Chief Commercial Officer Dan Schatt says that gift cards are an easy market entry for kids and others intimidated by the high prices of some of the world’s hottest stocks.
But its fees are higher than the average broker — and customers won’t even get a whole share.
For instance, if customers buy a $29.95 gift card for Alphabet’s stock, they would only be investing $25, and the rest would be in fees.