Credit Cards

V for Vendetta

Marcel has a post up about credit card hacking. My kids use all cards all the time. I try to use cash for incidentals, I don't want to see a long list of transactions at the end of the month that I am supposed to reconcile.
     The worst part is that the credit card companies are like the mafia. They offer you 'protection', but then they charge you for it, sometimes as much as 5%. Now I can see how using credit card transactions can benefit a business. You don't have to spend any time actually handling cash, counting it, transporting it, or losing it. You may not be dealing with a large sum of money, maybe only a couple of hundred dollars, but still, having to take the day's receipts to the bank and picking up change for the next day's business takes time. Plus you don't have to worry about losing your money, like you do with cash.
    So I can see how a business would like to use credit cards. But what the credit card companies are charging is extortion. Credit card companies are all trying to recruit customers with their promises of cash back, but who do you think is paying for those kick-backs? You are. And I'll bet the credit card companies are using every trick in the book to maximize their return and minimize those kick-backs. It might not be something any one person would notice, but one-tenth of one percent of a billion dollars is still a million bucks.
    I'll bet there is well documented phenomena that a certain percentage of those kick-back checks are never cashed, and I'll bet that goes into the executive bonus slush fund as well.