American Express Increases Rewards

Amex is offering double membership rewards miles on gas and groceries for the next twelve months. The trick is that you have to register here. I currently get 5% back on gas from my Amex Platinum Business Open card. Membership Reward points are fairly valuable, mostly due to their flexibility in that they can be redeemed for miles and award with dozens of airlines, hotel chains, and retailers. If I was a Membership Rewards member, I might just switch my gas spending over. I would certainly charge my groceries there.

One trick you might consider is purchasing gift cards. My local grocer has a whole tree of gift cards for dozens of different businesses. If I was going to buy a new grill at Home Depot, I could buy a few hundred dollars of Home Depot gift cards at my grocery store, and earn the double Membership Rewards points. I have seen gift cards for airlines, hotels, and restaurants too.

Don’t forget to register, it can’t hurt.

American Express Decreases Rewards

Remember my Amex Platinum Business Open card that gives me 5% cash back on gas. It also gives me 5% cash back on Delta purchases. Apparently, the same is true of some of the Amex Delta cards as well. Unfortunately, it appears that this discount will be dropped as of May 15. This means, if you have a big Delta ticket purchase to make, you might want to do so in the next month or so. I am not sure if that applies to my non-Delta Amex Open Bussiness Platinum card, but I will check it out.

Chase Comes Clean On Bogus Fee

Chase made an offer that to it’s customers to have them transfer their balances for a one time fee. Then, it sent out a letter telling it’s customers that a $10 a month fee would be added. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo opened an investigation after being flooded with complaints about essentially a $120 a year annual fee. Here is the CNN article.

Here is my favorite part: “Last Thursday, Chase agreed to comply with the demand, Cuomo said.

However, the bank said it decided to withdraw the fee based on cardholders’ feedback.”

I love it. When has a bank ever lowered it’s fees due to customer feedback. They broke the law and they got caught, now they are trying to dress it up as customer service.

Life After Death For The Circuit City Credit Card

You remember Circuit City? This is the company that fired it’s best employees because they were earning too much, only to replace them with lower skilled, lesser paid employees. To their shock, customer satisfaction plummeted and they were eventually forced into bankruptcy and liquidation.

My memories of Circuit City date back to a couple of weeks in early 2006 when I did some technology consulting for them. I spent two weeks at their headquarters in Richmond, Virginia, standing around waiting to perform some work. When I did, it took me only a couple hours to complete. It turns out that Circuit City hired IBM, to hire another contracting company, to hire me, and fly me out to Virginia every week, all expenses paid. There were dozens of similar contractors there in a what can only be described as a model of inefficiency. I was not surprised or disappointed to see them vanish.

Now, Circuit City is no more, but their credit card lives on. Good luck to anybody who thought that Circuit City operated their credit card and their debts were forgiven when Circuit City ceased to exist. Instead, our good friends at Chase have taken over their accounts, and will be linking them with Circuit City’s former competitor, Best Buy. You can see a sample of the letter sent out to card holders here, via The Consumerist.

I suppose if the Circuit City card interested you, you will probably be equally interested in a Best Buy credit card. More likely, you signed up for the card in order to get 10% off of a purchase some time ago, and forgot that you had the card. Anyways, now you know the rest of the story.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 23:29 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.