My thoughts (long, sorry):
1. The concept of a relationship with a corporation (with all due respect to Citizens United) is a joke. They exist to make money. You represent an opportunity to make money. They, in turn, offer a service or product you find valuable and are either willing to pay for (annual fee/interest) or provide them a mechanism to make profit (usage fees). There is no relationship until you reach the income/asset level that entitles you to private banking services. Even then, you are just a route to a different form of profit. The only reason to ever get a card is because it provides you with some benefit. If it stops providing that benefit, you should stop using it. To me, worrying about what a company "thinks" or "feels" or "wants" is anthropomorphism at its worst.
2. While the 3x cli at 60 days is a nice feature (and I suspect is a legacy from their computer algorithms having been developed for charge cards), I agree it is just a feature and not a guarantee. That being said, I see no value in trying to base your spending pattern on an artificial attempt to get a cli. Use the card for the reasons you got it. If you got it just for gas and groceries, use it for gas and groceries. There are just as many people who got the 3x cli after just doing that as there are those who ran large amounts through it every month. I personally had a 3k spend in 3 months to get the bonus points, so combined with a very low limit (1k), I had to pay multiple times/month to keep under the limit. Is that normal for me? No. Did I do it to get the 3x cli? No. I did it to get the bonus. I also got the cli to 3k, but if I never get another bump, the card will still be useful to me.
3. While I respect Credit Scholar's point conceptually, I don't know if the evidence bears it out. There are too many examples of people putting 150/month on the card and still getting clis for it to be purely valid. The algorithms Amex uses are incredibly complex. The idea that something as simple as spending amount per month over two months would reliably predict cli success seems mathematically unlikely to me.
4. This forum is an exception. Most Americans are not rebuilding their credit, while I supect the majority of users of these forums is. The average credit score nationwide is still around 720. I doubt the average score of forum members is that high. The strategies employed or recommended here are always going to be exceptional because of that.
5. The "relationship" you build with a Zync (now green, I guess) isn't a relationship, its data. Some people have very high credit scores combined with high income. They don't need to game the system because they are who the system was designed for. Some have high credit scores and low income. They will have to play some games to overcome the impact of their low income. Getting GE backed cards or NFCU, etc. is a way to boost credit limits through gamesmanship in order to take advantage of products that were initially designed for people with higher income. By the same token, there are some who have high incomes but poor credit scores (such as myself). In order to get products that are useful to us, we also have to game the system. So I got a Zync and gave Amex 6 months of data. This data helped Amex make decisions about me that didn't just center on my credit scores (bad) and income (ok). This wasn't a "relationship", Amex isn't going to buy me flowers or let me get to 2nd base. But that doesn't invalidate the strategy. I think my spending habits match what Amex targets. I think that seeing that will make Amex more likely to give me useful products despite my poor score. I think many other rebuilders on this forum could benefit in the same way.
6. "High income" on this forum (and in American generally) is a misnomer. If your household income is less than 350k/year, you are not wealthy. If your household income is 100k to 350k, you are (the incredibly shrinking) middle class. I know nobody likes to be told they are poor, so I won't continue the example. Call yourselves working class, whatever. The point is that there are lots of products designed for the working poor (Walmart, for example) and many designed for the middle class (Chase Freedom, discover more, etc.) and there are some products designed for the wealthy. Amex may have expanded their base to remain profitable, but at their core they are still designing products for the wealthy. If you are not in that group, it is reasonable to expect you will need to game the system to some degree to get the products that work for you.
7. I think a huge amount of the issues that arise around Amex products on this forum (including the cli issue) come from a fundamental disconnect: a group of people who are rebuilding their credit or just starting out, most of whom earn less than 100k and don't travel extensively for work are constantly discussing an issuer whose products are primarily designed for business travelers with excellent credit whose income routinely exceeds 100k (often by a lot). As long as that is the case, there will be "disappointed in amex" threads and "I hate amex, they didn't give me 3x cli" threads and "what is the value of amex green", etc.
In wallet: Ink Plus 10k, AMEX TE 25k. In bag: CSP 16k, USAA WMC 15k, Hyatt 13k, United MPE 12k, AMEX HHonors 3k. In SD: Cap 1 QS 5k, Discover IT 7k. FICO 08 says my EQ is now 844, was 510 in 2010.
Starting Score: TU 672 EQ 654 10/20/09
