Small business owners, listen up: Rachel Wallace, marketing director at Wallace Oil in La Junta, Colo., has a new "big box" killer. (Thought that would get your attention.)Wallace Oil owns and leases six gas stations and a convenience store, and Wallace is always looking for ways to land new customers and keep her existing ones coming back. Last spring The State Bank of La Junta showed her a demonstration of a new mobile payment service powered by Bling Nation. "I signed up after two minutes," says Wallace, who is also president of the local Chamber of Commerce.She has company: About 80 merchants now use Bling in the La Junta area, she adds. That’s pretty good penetration for the most populous city of Otero County (pop: 7,568). Bling Nation’s service involves two pieces of hardware: a postage-stamp-size microchip that sticks to the back of any cell phone and a point-of-purchase scanner (much like a credit card machine).

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