Additional clutter on the card would make Steve Jobs’ ghost sad.
“Trying to read numbers off the card? You’re doing it wrong.”
It is indeed a bit maddening. I have an Apple Card because I wanted to get 24 months of interest free payments on a MacBook Pro. I don’t have an iPhone. So… I can only ever look up my balance and payments on my MacBook. It’s a complete pain in the ass.
“Click here for the one thing you need to do with your Apple card.”
After pages of boring ads:
“Write the customer service contact number on the back with an indelible marker.”
Here’s an earlier discussion (my blushes):
How well did breaking up the Baby Bells work? They were separated for a while, into seven or eight separate companies, but eventually recombined to form the present ATT and Verizon.
But they have way, way, less market power than the combined AT&T had. Right now there is a duopoly in “last 100 yards” in most places where your only choice for broadband is your [legacy] cable tv company or the [legacy] wireline phone company. At least they are competing with each other. And they are competing with wireless as well as wireless speeds increase.
The big bad AT&T of old controlled the entire telecoms network from end to end. And leveraged that control in a way that would make Steve Jobs weep. They approved what phone you would use, effectively monopolizing the equipment market as well. They charged high prices, over-engineered the heck out of the network and spent millions buying off regulators.
I remember back in the 19060s and 70s, when my father traveled for his job. He had Diner’s Club, American Express, gasoline cards, a Universal Air Travel Card (which was by no means universal), department store charge cards and who knows what else. The credit card section of his wallet was at least an inch thick, because no one accepted anyone else’s card, and he couldn’t be caught out on the road needing gas at a Texaco station and all he had was a Sinclair card. Then BankAmericard went national, and MasterCharge came along as a competitor. One by one all those privately issued cards went by the wayside. Discover, IIRC, was supposed to be a lower-cost competitor backed by Sears, but it never found much acceptance by other merchants.
Clearly those major companies must have found some advantage in either getting rid of their own cards or simply having Visa/MC issue cards with a company logo on them. Given that the fees Visa, MC, and Discover charge merchants are very similar, and AmEx is a tad higher, I suspect there’s no real competition because no one else thinks they can make money off the business.
But they haven’t. You can still go into many stores and get a store credit card, one that is only good at that store and its subsidiaries. They do so because they can save themselves the interchange fees, and often have some pretty attractive offers to get you to sign up.
Which stores still offer non-Visa, non-Mastercard store cards? I haven’t seen that in a long time.
Target’s Red Card is a big one. As I understand Target actually has its own financial division to administer it themselves, to save themselves the fees for processing credit cards.
I used to have a Kohl’s charge card, but they canceled it because I never used it (yes, I signed up specifically to get a big discount they were offering). I assume they still offer them, but I could be wrong.
Thanks. You’re right; Target has a Mastercard card plus they also have the Red Card.
They do; I just used mine a couple of weeks ago.
Store credit cards didn’t all go away. People still use them, but they can also use their Visa or M/C to purchase an item, and they usually get points or miles for doing so. The stores must still make money on their cards, or they wouldn’t have them anymore
They have in Canada. Almost all are now co-branded cards that are backed by an FI, rather than the store dealing with the credit risk. The last hold outs are the gasoline companies, and even those have largely outsourced their credit operations.
Sorry. Usually do a thread search but don’t think I did this time.
Sorry, I forgot we were talking about Canada and not the US. My bad.
Right, it’s all the infrastructure–the “payment rails”, as the business calls them. Nobody’s going to build THAT.
There have been plenty of attempts to do things in the Payments space; I have a page full of names. They’re all nibbling at the edges, trying to get a piece of the pie. But you have to be an Apple or a Google (or maybe a Samsung) to really do a whatever Pay.
My favorites among the failures: ISIS (bad name) and–at least a runner-up for stupidest name–Clinkle!
BTW, to get a sense of how big business this is, here are some reported numbers from 2015, U.S. market:
Total credit card spend: $1.5T
Payments industry revenues: $150B (yes, ten cents on the dollar!)
Fraud: $5-7B
Losses to default/bankruptcy: $25B
So if you’ve ever wondered why the Payments industry doesn’t seem that worried about fraud, look at those numbers. Sure, they don’t want it to go up, but as long as it stays around those numbers, it’s fine, nothing to see here. They’re more worried about consumer confidence–they don’t want YOU to worry your little head about whether it’s safe to use your card and maybe do something crazy like use a check (or a cheque) or gasp pay cash!
Target Red Card is closer to debit (well, ACH) than a true credit card, to the best of my knowledge. Very different animal. And since it’s single-merchant, kind of a non-player.
Any branded card (“Target Mastercard”) is of course just a marketing deal.
Weirdly, Apple also has cards issued by Green Dot Bank. I haven’t figured out how those relate to/differ from the Goldman versions, but GDB seems to be a different entity than GS.