- Nintendo is making a bunch of weird DIY cardboard toys for the Switch and they’re awesome by The Verge. This looks seriously awesome, especially things like the foot pedal. I really like this for kids as well as it’s all about creating and could help them get interested in things like engineering.
- Dining perks from Amex: Taste from American Express Invites by Frequent Miler. The restaurant selection absolutely sucks, but worth checking out to see if by some miracle there is a good one near you.
- AmEx’s Customer Rewards Are Starting to Get Costly by Bloomberg. Citi exiting the rewards market isn’t news, but looks like American Express have finally released they need to spend more to compete.
- New Jersey Man Investigated, Arrested After Purchasing Multiple Gift Cards From CVS by Reason via VFTW.
- New Tennessee law would aim to break link between gift cards and opioids by Knox News. Not sure how much this will affect most people as it looks like they are targeting return fraud.
The CVS story is too funny. I’m imagining this guy thinking hookers are a 5x category this quarter.
actually, the story is not funny at all because it has implications to our game. its already bad enough that we play on the same fukn criminal highway, but shit will hit the fan when blanket nationwide bans and laws get put in place. POMO is just one example of big changes. im still shocked tho at the number of people able to abuse WMMO. I need to move to hick county.
The “New Tennessee law” article is a joke. All they care about is the loss of their sales tax revenue and are using the cause du jour “opioid crisis” as an excuse.
That said, theft from retail stores is a huge problem since so many places have such lax return policies. I wonder if places like WalMart and Home Depot have the ability to link a store-credit card to an individual, so that only that person can use it in the future.
These scumbags steal and return stuff for the cash they can get. If all they could get was non-transferable store credit it should reduce theft, if the only thing they could get when returning their stolen goods is a store gift card with their name on it and cashiers are trained to require and verify ID when it’s used.
Home depot is definitely linking store credit from returns to your drivers license. Often (but not always) when I use the self checkout and pay with storr credit it calls the cashier and displays on their screen to check for ID. I’m pretty sure I saw my name on the screen once but didn’t get a really good look before they just clicked OK. I’ve never had one of them actually check for ID
Yes it shows the name attached to the merch credit. My Home Depot checks every time.
Interesting. I’m ok with that.
“About $42 billion of co-brand deals are open for bid in 2018 and 2019” according to Bloomberg. It shows how much these card companies are willing to pay to acquire customers. This plus the bonuses, etc… is the customer acquisition cost.
Back to the time when PPMC was still alive (before May 2017), I bought 2 – 3 x $500 PPMC@CVS in a day, presented my driver license, casual talked with the cashier, not a problem to me. I do recall that even in a same store location, if a different cashier insists no CC for GC purchase, then I should just leave and come back on a different day when that person rejected me before would not be there. I wouldn’t stick into one single store unless the same cashier who’s been helping me a lot knows me well and knows what I’m doing.
After PPMC is dead, I switched to S&S. There’s one near my home and one near my workplace. When I went to either one at the beginning, I was honest to them: that’s for me to get sign up bonus of the credit card and/or credit card bonus whatsoever. They checked my driver license making sure names match on the CC. Sometimes I would remind them this procedure if a new cashier/customer service is not familiar with it or skip it, I remind them especially when their manager is there so they trust me and know me well, know that this is clearly not fraud, “just some guy gaming with the bank”, at least he’s “using his own card to pay on the usage of the card”. I even told them how I take advantage of bluebird / serve load on the MCGC. I know this game well, maybe not an expert but I wouldn’t do anything like in and out several times in a day to buy. That’s just making yourself look suspicious.
Just out of curiosity, since I don’t keep balances on my credit cards and pay them in full each month, are these companies making money off me?
Just trying to think like a credit card company for a moment. Obviously the customers that carry balances and pay interest are their bread and butter. But what about those that don’t?
CC company’s make money off swipes as well, per transaction they charge to the merchant. But you’re right interest is the real money maker
That apostrophe is just brutal.
Your right 🙂
There’s an excellent article on the economics of churning on r/churning somewhere. You could probably search for that specifically, or “who pays for churning” or some such. It’s about 50/50 interchange fees and interest as far as where the banks eventually get their money (as I recall). But businesses who accept credit cards have raised their prices to account for the interchange fees, so in another sense the people who pay for your bonuses are people paying cash.
Yes, they make money on the interchange fees charged to merchants. Something like 1.5% will go towards the card issuer, then the payment network gets something and so does the merchant processor.