American Express Actually Pays Customers to Close Out Accounts
Did I read this right? American Express, one of the biggest credit card lenders in America, is going to start offering to some of it’s customers to shut down their accounts with them, and get compensated for doing so. I’ve heard of compensating or rewarding customers to do certain things – like maybe buy something new or buy something specific at a specific time, but never a company paying customers to stop using their services, but hey I guess these different times call for different, albeit even strange measures.
But there is a catch, first you have to be part of a selected group that apparently the company does not deem as being profitable enough, and second you also have to pay off any existing balance on the credit card before you are compensated. But the price they are paying for these voluntary shut downs of accounts is pretty good I’d say, three hundred dollars!
American Express is just one creditor among hundreds who is really feeling the pain of the recession and is facing increasing losses with every month that passes due to people not paying their bills or stiffing them all together, which is surprising because American Express caters to the upper class when it comes to economic structure, and apparently they are suffering just as much as the middle and lower classes.
All credit card companies have responded to the crisis by scaling back on people’s available spending balance, as well as randomly increasing minimum payments and also sometimes even repricing the accounts into higher APR percentags, which is making it harder for many people to pay their card bills every month, and which is also hurting the economy further because it seems like all this easy credit isn’t there any more, and reducing the circulation of “money”, albeit not actual real money, in the economy.
Retailers are feeling the hurt because people aren’t using their credit cards as much due to these scale backs. Heck, I’m in a sales related business part time, and I’ve seen my sales slump tremendously since October of 2008, and I know it’s because people are scaling way back on credit card use.
