@Discover2016 wrote:Aaaand my ban of Comenity continues..
Just had to drop in to say -- what a beautiful looking Ruby 
Here's the thing (and I was reminded of this the other day when I opined too broadly on account closures in another thread 
): When accounts are closed seemingly out of the blue, there's always something else going on that you don't necessarily know about, or think of off the top of your head. It's not even often anything that's necessarily your fault, because in a lot of instances you can be carrying on with your cards in the same way you always have but something has changed on the issuer side. A lot of times it's because the issuer is changing or tightening up their policies in some way because of information that they have, not necessarily related to you personally but more likely to the overall market, that you don't have, and the unfortunate account holder - you - gets smacked as a result.
Now, we're seeing a couple of things going on here, as you'll notice from reading up on the articles linked in Credit in the News. First, there's a big wave of closure and consolidation going on in the brick-and-mortar retail market, which forms a crucial part of Comenity's business. Simply and somewhat crudely put, there's more physical retail capacity available than the market can handle, coupled with the fact that a number of retail companies have made errors of judgment that are now coming back to bite them in the rear end and in some cases causing them to shut down completely (e.g., HHGregg, Sears). This isn't helped by the fact that the thousand-pound gorilla of online retail, Amazon, is fixing to enter the B&M retail market in a big way over the next few years.
Second, there's (another) wave of defaults, as well as accountholders not quite defaulting but getting into significant debt trouble, going on in the consumer-credit market. This is hitting especially, but not by any means exclusively, issuers that have a lot of their business with the not-spectacular-credit/rebuilding segment of the market, like Capital One, Synchrony...and Comenity. The percentage of defaults has gone up markedly, and issuers are retrenching and taking stricter and more conservative stands overall. As a result, people who are exposed in one way or another - especially, but not again exclusively, folks who have a LOT of cards, people who've been hitting the CLI buttons too enthusiastically, people who've opened cards (many with generous CL's) but not made any significant use of them, etc., etc., etc. (it can be something as minor - as we've seen in at least one case here recently! - as updating your income information too soon after opening a new account) - are now more liable to AA's from those issuers as said issuers take steps to reduce their risk.
In that connection, I say again that it's my hunch that Comenity will put an end to the famous (or infamous) Shopping Cart Trick in the not-too-distant future. From all the signs, it's slowly, or maybe not so slowly, becoming more trouble to them than it's worth to keep around.