Tonight on GeekNights, we review the Warwick Applefest. If we can review a concert or a convention, we can review a small town apple festival. In the news, America has yet another political crisis as Republicans oust their own Speaker of the House while engaging in extreme pettiness, and there is a "crisis" in ticket reselling arbitrage after people aren't that interested in seeing Travis Scott live for some reason.
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Haven’t listened yet, but I’m currently reading a folk horror novel about haunted fruit (Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig) so it was very surreal to wake up this morning at 6a and see the topic haha. Looking forward to listening tho!
I think you are missing an important part of credit card points and airmiles systems. It isn’t “the traders” who pay for the credit card fees, it’s an expense that is passed on to consumers.
And not just to credit card using consumers, but to all consumers, as there isn’t a price increase for the card usage. So those who pay cash or don’t have frequent flier accounts don’t pay less but actually more.
Really, the benefits of card points and air miles are just wealth transfer from cash/debit card-based consumers and non-frequent fliers.
A quick google brings up articles like this:
A 2010 paper, of which Stavins was also a co-author, found that in this wealth transfer system, households that use cash pay about $149 on average to households that use credit cards, and each of the credit card households gets $1,133 from cash users every year. And, again, because lower-income people are likelier to pay in cash than high-income people, that means the poor are losing out at the hands of the rich.
Yep, that’s the bigger picture. The money always comes from somewhere. And the rules we have had to try to fix the problem have not done well.