I have a way that I save money. My wife and I have four different cashback credit cards that we use on a daily basis. Each one gives us great terms. One gives us 5% cashback on fuel and groceries. Another, 5% cashback on Amazon. A third is 5% on dining out, and the fourth is 5% on travel and hotel stays. There are other deals. All in all, we probably spend $50k a year on those cards. We pay the cards off every month. It’s like giving yourself a raise. I get money, the issuing bank for the credit card makes money, the processor makes money.
Why is this important? Because Giffords is pressuring banks to flag and prevent credit cards from being used to buy guns and ammunition. That kind of shit has been tried before. When Citibank did a similar thing back in 2018, I immediately canceled by credit card with them. The company that the card was for was Best Buy. I haven’t bought anything from them since, nor have I done any business with Citibank.
So here is my announcement: You aren’t going to stop me from buying guns and ammo. You are just going to stop yourself from making money on the deal. I won’t hesitate to cancel every credit card that I have with your company. Someone will make money on the deal, it just won’t be you, and I will still have my guns and ammo. So die on that hill, and see what happens.
I know that $50k a year doesn’t seem like a lot, but there are millions of people who buy guns every year. Now imagine that you not only lose the processing fees from those sales, but losing the fees from every purchase those people would have made. Now it’s billions of dollars in lost business. Every. Single. Year.
Go ahead, FAFO.
3 Comments
D · November 20, 2022 at 2:53 pm
I used to do about $9k/mo for several years on one of my business cards and almost always paid it off completely.
Then Citi did their thing, and like you, I cancelled it. Now someone else is getting my money.
I have a short blacklist of companies I refuse to do business with under any circumstances short of “I need this because it’s life-or-death”. So far, nothing has been life-or-death enough to get my to use any of them.
Steve · November 20, 2022 at 7:17 pm
Yep. Now that I’m retired, we are probably doing only about as much business on cards as you do (and paid it off every month), and I was doing at least 5x what the previous poster talked about, since there is not a whole lot of markup you can do on computer hardware.
I dropped cards that did that, and, yet, what happened? So far as I can tell, nothing. Maybe that’s just because I was an early adopter, but it is discouraging that my boycott had absolutely no effect, other than on me.
Elrod · November 20, 2022 at 8:18 pm
$50K. Peanuts.
$50K / 4 cards = smaller peanuts
Smaller peanuts X millions of gun owners = large part of the peanut industry.
I wonder what the raw numbers on their balance sheets look like. Except “good luck getting those X million to change.”
Someone here suggested it a while back, but if America would go “cash only” for 30 days, hell even just 15 days, Things Would Change.
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