Cash Back Rewards Cards Are Wasteful Scams

A little more than a year ago, I decided I needed a better cash rewards card than what I currently had, so I went out and signed up for a Chase Freedom Visa Card.  The card paid 3% cash back on gas, groceries, and fast food purchases (the terms have changed slightly since then).  Pretty sweet, huh?  Well yeah, the only problem is, I’ve yet to get a check.

Chase has a peculiar and wasteful rewards structure.  Instead of simply crediting your account every month with the amount of cash-back rewards you earned during the last period, which is the simplest and most economical method of doing things, Chase insists on ONLY paying out when you reach 50 reward points, which is good for a $50 check in the mail.  If you choose, you can hold out until you accumulate 200 points, in which case you’ll get a $250 check in the mail.  So far so good.  After a little over a year of day-to-day spending, I finally accumulated 200 points.  I log onto the Chase website to claim my reward, which is when I first discover they only pay by check. 

“Odd,” I said to myself.  “They could save themselves a ton of money on paper and postage by doing this electronically.  They would also save countless innocent trees and spare the environment several tons of harmful carbon dioxide emmissions due to shipping said dead trees halfway across the country for no reason.”  Having no other choice, I pressed the “kill a tree and pollute the environment button for no good reason even though there’s an efficient, clean, and inexpensive alternative” button.  Hey, it’s 250 bucks and ideals come cheap.

Six weeks go by and still no check in the mail.  Determined not to have that tree die in vain, I call Chase on the phone (as opposed to the television) and say “Hey BUDDY, where’s my check?” just like that.  I don’t take crap off of nobody when there’s money involved.  After sitting on hold for 20 or 30 minutes, an indian man answers the phone and appears to apologize profusely for the mix-up.  I say “appears to” because I was having a hard time understanding anything he was saying.  Apparently, Huge Evil Multinational Bank off-shored their call-center to India because they are an evil corporation that hates the American middle class and plans to profit from its downfall.  Either that or they just happened to hire an indian guy to work in their call center.  Anyway, the customer service representative basically swears to me the check was sent and must have gotten “lost in the mail”.  Yeah right, as if the post office has ever made a mistake.  He then informs me he can’t help but that he will turn my case over to “Research”, which I can only assume is a euphemism for the trash bin. 

“Not to worry,” he informs me, “they will call you in 7 to 10 days to discuss your claim.”

“What claim?” I exclaim.  “You can see perfectly well the alleged check you sent was never cashed.  Just cancel it and issue a new one.”  Okay I embellished that last part a little but the point remains, it couldn’t be done.

So here I am at the mercy of a giant, evil multi-national corporation laughing at me, earning interest on MY $250 as we speak, with no end in sight.  Knowing what I know from past experience with Chase customer service, I should have my check by April 2010, thousands of gallons of gasoline and millions of dead trees later.  OR they could just credit the money directly to my account.  Simple, clean, easy, no possibility of confusion or “lost checks”.  What do you say, Chase?  Oh that’s right, then you wouldn’t earn millions of dollars in interest on the float.  I guess your bonus check is more important than the environment.  My bad.