@CreditCuriousity wrote:I disagree... $750 a month cap is hardly alot to be abused and other people are using it for alot of other stuff.. They clearly know it is being used on Amazon.
Again, it isn't about the cap, it's about the card being used to get things that aren't... books but getting that same discount on a disproportionate basis. It's not really up to you or me to decide what SM considers "abuse" though. It's up to them. And $750 is quite enough for monthly Amazon spend, when you consider that the average spend for Prime members on Amazon is $1500 a year, and non-prime members spend on average only $625 a year (link). In that light, $750 isn't exactly a small cap as it is likely more than enough for even people who on average spend 5x the Prime member average.
SM meant the card's book rewards for students and parents who need to buy a lot of books at the beginning of a semester. Amazon used be a bookstore, but it's so much more now. In fact, allowing Apple Appstore or Google Play store purchases as book purchases would make more sense as a big part of both stores is digital books. True, SM can redesign the program to better fit this, and perhaps they will. That they know it's being used on Amazon is not the same as saying they intended it to be a general use 5% card (which is what Amazon use essentially makes it).
@CreditCuriousity wrote:
Not a ton of people know about the card and they are consistently offering spend incentives to people for additional bonuses, so they aren't losing money IMO.
Actually, your logic could work the other way. Since not a ton of people know about the card, it would make sense to extrapolate that the card's userbase is relatively small, and since it takes some digging to find out about it, perhaps more selective about rewards than the typical credit card user. Which means that if Amazon's ubiquitous marketplace was not an intended category for the card, even a relatively small number of cardholders taking full advantage of that reward could adversely affect the books.
@CreditCuriousity wrote:
heck if I want to stack the odds in the card issuers favor I will use all 1% cards.. Kinda like saying someone that uses the freedom or discover for the 5% cats are abusing the card.. I hardly feel bad for any big banks, they are all extremely profitable and stick their hands in the tax-payer pockets being my pocket and yours without feeling bad.
Well, it would also be foolish to think that you figuring out a way to get some extra rewards is somehow proportionate to their taxpayer helps. This is a terrible forum to debate fiscal policy. And to fully debate it, it will require political discussion outside of the scope of this forum. But to be clear, if you are under the impression that I think you owe something to the banks, let me disabuse of that notion right here. I have no problem with you or anyone else taking advantage of a currently existing rewards structure, whether the issuing bank originally intended for a certain store to be included in a certain category.
What I am saying, however, is that the bank, from its perspective as a lender, may well see the card's overuse on Amazon as an abuse of a loophole - regardless of the fact that the loophole is of their creation - and thus may choose to close that loophole. That is my point. This isn't about banks being nice chaps. This isn't some kind of a moral issue. This is practical. This is business. Banks don't care that they took taxpayer loans (like a lot of us don't care that they paid it back), when deciding whether a particular credit product is profitable for them. That is the only question with respect to nerfing. Taxpayer lifelines have nothing to do with whehter a product is likely to be nerfed, which is the question we are trying to address here.
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