So today I decided that for my Mastercard credit card I am going to switch it from an air miles reward plan to a cash back credit card. The reason for this is that I think I want to try something different next year when it comes to making extra money which will involve using the credit card a lot more.

I always said that people are throwing away free money by not taking advantage of the rewards on credit cards as oppose to just using cash, so maybe this will be a great way to see how much I can accumulate when am specifically trying to earn as much as possible.

As of now I currently have a plan where for every $40 I spend on the card I get one air miles point. It’s not exactly great, but then again I treat it more as a bonus and incentive to stay away from cash whenever possible. I don’t like paying for annual fees either as you have to spend a lot to get say $90 values when it comes time to redeem your points. As you can see here, these are the options that I have:

So instead, they have this cash back option where for every dollar that you spend you get 0.5% cash back. Similarly, I don’t really want to pay the annual fee to get a 1% rate.

While I’m sure too there are credit cards I can apply for that would offer the one percent, I’d rather not get more credit cards than I need for simplicity sake. I did submit the request to my bank to change it, so I now just have to wait. Will be interesting to see how this goes.

Today I was helping a friend buy a TV for his other friend and we ended up going to Costco to buy it. Before he was debating whether or not it was better to make the purchase with his debit or credit card and I mentioned that the credit card is better since you could get free additional warranty on the TV as well as getting bonus points for using the credit card. So, he researched it on the corporate site and it appeared that they accepted every major credit card.

Upon going to the warehouse to make the purchase, surprisingly they didn’t accept Visa or Mastercard. Instead, they only accepted American Express. Besides that, the only other option was to pay in cash or debit. So unfortunately, he had to pay by debit. The highlight out of this I thought was the responses from the staff I thought.

My friend first questioned why they would accept Mastercard online but not in the store and the staff member just said that the online store was different in ho-hum type of way. Disappointed, he politely vented out how he thought that was a silly answer considering it was the same company, but without too much fuss the purchase was made.

Then something else came up where on his receipt there was this additional fee on the purchase which wasn’t clearly labeled. As a result, he went to the services desk to ask about it. At first I was guessing that it was that electronics recycling fee program that was implemented not too long ago and sure enough it was.

The interesting thing was upon approaching the person at the service desk, who seemed like he was the manager, he immediately answers by saying “Go talk to Gordon Campbell and he’ll tell you as I don’t know”. For those who don’t know, Gordon Campbell is the Premier of this province. I was just thinking “What kind of response is that?” Sure enough, he just continued to say how he has no idea where this fee goes to as it was simply a cash grab from the government in his mind. At the same time, he re-emphasized that Costco has nothing to do with it and that my friend should ask the Premier if he wanted answers.

Kind of makes you never want to do business with them again huh? I must say, this was one of the craziest examples I have seen of a business that simply blamed everyone else as opposed to trying to help the customer understand its policies and practices.