# Why would Discover make Credit card offers endlessly **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 30, 2014, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456 "2014-07-30T23:36:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![rsa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/839c29/32.png) [@rsa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rsa)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2014, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456/1 "2014-07-30T23:36:35Z")
I’ve been getting a number of credit card offers in the last few months. Usually a large bank will make an offer, I ignore it; then they may make another offer with a lower interest rate, I don’t care; then perhaps they’ll try one more time and that’s the end of it. For example, AmEx offered a green card with no fee for the 1st year, then $95 per year, gee no thanks; then an offer for their black card with no first year fee than $195 a year, really no thanks; then finally an offer for a bank issued AmEx credit (not charge) card. Then they gave up. Discover Card on the other hand has been sending me endlessly offers for perhaps three months now. I suppose the interest rate was high initially and has been lowered to a “good” rate now, but other than that the offers have been the same. I haven’t kept track, but twenty-five offers would be a very conservative estimate. Why would they waste marketing money to this extent? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [July 30, 2014, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456/2 "2014-07-30T23:45:43Z")
I assume they are getting a high enough response rate to justify it. I have one, so I don’t get the offers, but about a piece of mail a day from ComCast or AT&T about going to cable. And fancy mail also. Marketing guys are data driven - they’d stop sending the stuff if no one bit. ---
**Author:** ![rsa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/839c29/32.png) [@rsa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rsa)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2014, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456/3 "2014-07-31T00:09:54Z")
Good point. AT&T and Comcast are persistent over an extended period of time but nowhere near the quantity I’m getting from Discover over a relatively short time. Surely there are diminishing returns. How many people who haven’t responded to twenty offers are all of a sudden going to respond to the twenty-first or twenty-fifth? ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2014, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456/4 "2014-07-31T00:48:42Z")
Well, apparently it works for that insurance lizard. Geez, the number of junk mails I get about that! That company is single-handedly deforesting the whole Amazon basin. ---
**Author:** ![dstarfire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dstarfire/32/5762_2.png) [@dstarfire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dstarfire)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2014, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456/5 "2014-07-31T02:43:36Z")
You may not be interested today, but tomorrow you could suddenly develop a passion for antiquing (or any other activity that sucks up money faster than you can earn it). There are a number of reasons you (as a generic target) might be uninterested, some of which don’t depends on the terms of the offer. ---
**Author:** ![usedtobe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ec9cab/32.png) [@usedtobe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/usedtobe)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2014, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456/6 "2014-07-31T03:04:29Z")
Those are NOT “Offers”, regardless of terminology. In legal terms (IANAL), they are like any advertisement - they are “solicitations of offer”. They send those things (at least WFB did) to anything with a body temp over 80 F. If you say "Hey! I’m stupid! Send me one - THEN they will pull your credit and run it through their accept/reject processing. If I (with FICO too low to calculate) were to send in one of those, I’d get a terse “Sorry, we didn’t mean YOU”! letter. Was a time when, had I sent one in, I would have gotten a “Sorry, you already have more lines of credit than is good for you. If you crash and burn, we don’t want to be aboard” letter… ---
**Author:** ![rsa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/839c29/32.png) [@rsa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rsa)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2014, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456/7 "2014-07-31T03:32:18Z")
> [@usedtobe](#): > > Those are NOT “Offers”, regardless of terminology. > > In legal terms (IANAL), they are like any advertisement - they are “solicitations of offer”. > > They send those things (at least WFB did) to anything with a body temp over 80 F. > > If you say "Hey! I’m stupid! Send me one - THEN they will pull your credit and run it through their accept/reject processing. > > If I (with FICO too low to calculate) were to send in one of those, I’d get a terse “Sorry, we didn’t mean YOU”! letter. > > Was a time when, had I sent one in, I would have gotten a “Sorry, you already have more lines of credit than is good for you. If you crash and burn, we don’t want to be aboard” letter… While that may be true for prepaid credit cards, these offers I’m referring to are prescreened in that some group of people with a similar credit profile will get the offers. You’ll probably almost certainly get a card, but depending on the answers to the two or three questions they ask on the application you may get a credit limit of $500 or $10,000 or anywhere in between. ---
**Author:** ![dracoi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2014, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-would-discover-make-credit-card-offers-endlessly/694456/8 "2014-07-31T13:53:34Z")
> [@rsa](#): > > Good point. AT&T and Comcast are persistent over an extended period of time but nowhere near the quantity I’m getting from Discover over a relatively short time. > > Surely there are diminishing returns. How many people who haven’t responded to twenty offers are all of a sudden going to respond to the twenty-first or twenty-fifth? Honestly, you’d be surprised. A lot of marketing has to do with catching people at just the right time. Maybe they want a credit card, but they’re too busy right now. Or maybe your card offer arrives just as they arrive home in a loaner car because they blew a head gasket. I mean, you’re right numerically - it’s a small number of people. But Discover can afford to play the numbers game. Let’s say each new cardholder runs up $10,000 in charges; the merchant fees are going to be about $300 alone, even if it gets paid off right away. If it doesn’t, they’re looking at $1,000 to $3,000 a year in interest charges. If direct mail costs $1 each, then they can justify… I don’t know, 1000 mailings for every one response? That means if you respond just once every ten years, they can still afford to send you something twice a week.