NOTE (1) Our estimate of the loans outstanding is based on an estimated average loan balance per store of $42,500 divided by an average loan amount of $325 times the 1200 stores in Alabama.  The average store balance is for all 1200 stores in the state -- not just the large public companies who advertise aggressively and who tend to be in larger metro areas and have much larger balances.  The large stores represent less than 25% of the total stores in our state.  Most of the remaining 75% of stores in Alabama are locally owned by Alabama business people who live and work here. This number is dramatically lower than the flawed and misleading CRL and press estimates.  They use averages derived from data from Washington state and purport to show transactions over some period of time (unknown from the report).  It is not at all clear how they come up with over a billion transactions in Alabama when you consider our estimate of loans outstanding of less than 160,000.  More importantly, no adjustment is made by CRL for loans that are not collected (a significant factor) and, in fact, where the opposite occurs -- principal and fees are lost.  In other words for each $100 advanced a high percent is never seen again and is lost to default.  We are at a loss why they would use data from Washington that has no basis for the facts in our state.   .