How Credit Card Rewards Programs Play on your Emotions

Yesterday was the end of one of our credit card billing cycles, which made me excited…absurdly excited if you can believe it. You see, it’s one of those rewards credit cards, and at the end of the billing cycle we get to cash in the rewards we earned on that card. Personally, I have had my eye on a $25 gift card from Foot Locker for weeks now.

At 1st glance, credit card reward programs – whether they are airline miles, cash, or merchandise – seem like a bad idea for credit card companies until you consider…1. Credit card companies make gazillions of dollars off of interest charges and late payment penalties. The money they are spending on these customer rewards is peanuts by comparison. 2. Most people don’t even know their cards have a rewards system, and many that do are too lazy or incompetent to figure out how to cash them in. Take my wife’s 89 year old grandmother for example, who we just recently started logging into her account and checking her rewards balance on her behalf. 3. The rewards offer an incentive for those cardholders who do actually know what the deal is to use their card more often…which brings us back to the whole making gazillions of dollars off of interest charges again.

I’m sure there’s other stuff to consider as well, but that’s a good start at least. Now, we happen to pay our credit card bill in full every month, thus avoiding giving the credit card companies any extra money, so we are getting the full benefit of these rewards. But even a nerd like me that gets super-pumped about this stuff has to admit that these companies are playing psychological warfare with me, and they are winning.

You see, if I spend $1,000 using a particular credit card one month, it might only yield $20-25 in rewards (if I’m lucky). Now, when I do get my $25 gift card in the mail to Foot Locker or Panera Bread or Home Depot or whatever, my hype level is off the charts. However, I happen to have another rewards credit card that’s attached to my bank account, and that card gives you an extra incentive to deposit the rewards you earn right into your savings. Because it gives the best benefit overall, that’s what I do. If I spent $1,000 using that card, I would also probably earn in that same $20-25 range in rewards. However, a free $25 to Outback Steakhouse? I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. $25 into my savings account? I mean, I’ll take it because $25 is $25, but Christmas it is not.

And that’s where they get you, because on the 1st card I mentioned I have the option to apply that same $25 to my credit card balance. Have I ever done it? Hell to the no! A free meal or money off a fresh pair of sneakers sounds amazing. Reducing my card payment from $1,000 to $975 that month sounds meh…even though that would probably be the most financially responsible thing to do. If you are getting the gift card for something that you would have to buy whether you had the gift card or not, that’s one thing. But would I go out to eat or buy that new shirt if I didn’t have free money? Probably not, or at least not as often…and yet I’m going to continue to do the admittedly stupid thing, and opt to get a gift card every time. Because meh sucks, but Christmas morning is awesome every single time.

Suspended or Not, It's Over for A-Rod

2 days ago, Major League Baseball handed down the largest non-gambling related suspension in the history of the sport to Alex Rodriguez for not only taking performance enhancing drugs but for allegedly covering it up and obstructing MLB’s investigation as well. It was yet another opportunity for A-Rod to showcase himself as the most pretentious, disingenuous, and scripted athlete in all of professional team sports.

Kobe Bryant comes close...he has modeled not only his game, but his entire persona (both on and off the court), off of Michael Jordan. Every word out of Kobe’s mouth is rehearsed. But while I am not a Kobe fan in the least bit, there are a great many people that love him. And at least Kobe can back it up with his 5 rings, his undeniable tenacity as a competitor, and all of the swagger that comes with that. And unless you count a couple mysterious trips to Germany to have some blood-spinning procedure done to his knee, he has never cheated. Not to mention the fact that when he’s unfiltered and unsolicited, he might be the greatest tweeter or all time…Mamba, out.

But Rodriguez has none of that really. He does have the 1 championship and some very gaudy numbers, but in the prime of his career he was mostly looked at as a supremely talented player who always seemed to choke in the postseason or any other time when it mattered. Think LeBron if LeBron never started to show up in crunch time in the playoffs.

We thought of him as the guy who got signed for not 1 but 2 ludicrous contracts, the guy who’s teams always seemed to get better once he had moved on to another franchise, the guy who did a photo shoot where he appeared to be trying to smooch himself in a mirror, the guy who once swatted a baseball away with his hand like a little girl as he was running to 1st base, and the guy who tried to act tougher than he really was…only to get suplexed to the ground by Red Sox catcher and actual tough guy Jason Varitek.

The only cool thing I ever remember A-Rod doing was surprising Cal Ripken in an All-Star game by swapping positions with him. Now, that is a very distant memory. Even those other memorable-in-a-bad-way things wouldn’t even make the footnote in the Alex Rodriquez biography. A-Rod will from hence forth always be known as “Mr. PED”…the poster boy for the most tainted era in over a hundred years of professional baseball.

And as Rodriquez held his pregame press conference yesterday, in one of the most bizarre situations you will ever think of where he played his 1st game of the season on the same day that the league announced his year and a half long suspension, I couldn’t help but think of how fake and scripted it all was. Everything about A-Rod, from his fake smile, to his fake near-tears, to the way he squinted his eyes and craned his neck as he tried to fain a sense of interest while listening to each question was completely off-putting. His actual answers to those questions mattered little because you knew ahead of time they would be scripted as well. By this time, anything he says is either so generic and cliché or such a patent lie that it matters little. But what A-Rod has done is cement his place as the most universally disliked team sport athlete of his generation…good job by him.