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The protection offered by credit cards has real value.

Some anecdotes from this year:

I attempted to use LetsRoam over a year ago. It was a spectacular failure and offered no value. Cancelled and all was well. Over a year later they started charging me two monthly fees for who knows what reason. I called them, they bumbled around, and referred it asynchronously to some other department. I’m three months into these mysterious charges. All have been clawed back.

I tried educative.io and frequently encountered non-sense that was objectively, demonstrably false being presented with high confidence. I asked for a refund, and they said they don’t do that. I wasn’t really asking…

I paid a $2k deposit for a Harley that the dealer didn’t have in hand yet. There were unreasonable delays (I suspect they sold the bike to someone else for more), and the dealer’s policy was to not refund the deposit, but to only allow me to apply it to another motorcycle. Guess who else has policies. Because of the amount and timeframe, this was a little more involved, but still only took 15 minutes of my time.

I paid to park, but it appeared to fail. So, I tried again. I was doubled billed. Idk who I’d contact to request a refund. So, dispute it is.

I open my banks app, click dispute, and am refunded. It’s saved me untold hours of dealing with incompetence and/or maliciousness.

I simply don’t deal with this BS. I behave ethically (as best as one can judge that for themselves), but as soon as I hit abusive commercial sociopathy, I disengage. As far as I’m concerned, Visa / Chase are earning their 3%.




Nobody is saying that it has no value. The issue is that it has a finite value and the consumer should have the ability to choose how much they value it in a given context, instead of Visa prohibiting merchants from pricing the cost of that system into the customer's decision to use it.

If the total cost of processing fees and chargeback fraud in some industry is 10% and you want to pay the extra 10%, that's fine -- as long as people who don't think it's worth that much have the option to opt out of the insurance and pocket the 10%.




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