I've Reached a New Earning Level

Oh goodie. I’m so excited. I got a message from my bank that I had reached a new level of earning on my National City Visa rewards program. That would be the utmost awesomest kick ass w00t^* thing ever. Let’s open the message together, so you can share in my good fortune. Just give me a second to log into my National City account. While I’m doing that, I will share with you why this means so much to me. You see, back when I first started earning rewards I envisioned my wife and I going on a cruise or flying to Hawaii on our second honeymoon. All I needed to do was keep using my card for everyday things and the rewards would add up. After earning enough points, I could redeem them for airline or cruise tickets saving me on cash. But, it seemed like that would take forever.

Then, I decided that as much as I would love to do this, I didn’t want to wait that long. I redeemed my points for cash and bought myself a Nintendo Wii. Almost there... the anticipation is excruciating. Anyway, after redeeming my points for cash, I thought, “Just keep doing that.” Every time I earned enough points to redeem for cash I did. 2000 points = $4.00. Now, that doesn’t seem like a lot but over time I would see the benefit. I do all of my grocery shopping, bill paying, buying of gas, and practically everything else with my check card. It’s not hard to rack up the points… Hold on….what’s my password? Oh, yeah.

Where was I? So every couple of weeks I redeemed my points and got cash directly into my account. It was great. Okay, here we go. Open messages. Click on unread. I can’t wait. This is going to be so…

You have reached a new earning level

As of 07/20/2009, your earn rate of 2 points for $1 has ended and you will now receive 1 points for $1. Refer to your points from National City Terms & Conditions for details.

good… I’m sorry, let me read that again. My earn rate of 2 points for $1 has ended and I will now receive 1 point for $1.

I don’t know about this being positive. Usually, when I see something that says you’ve reached a new level of earning, I would think it means it would go up. I mean, this looks like I went down. It's like being told you won a million dollars and the tax on it is 105%. It’s like beating a level in a video game only to find out your princess is in another castle, oh and by the way, we’re taking one of your lives and half your score to boot. Well, let’s not get ourselves down over this. Let's go and redeem some points. That will make me feel better.

I have 2500 points, so I can redeem 2000 of them for $4.00. Go to catalog. Pick point levels 2000-4000. Click on $4.00 reward. Add to cart and order…huh? Insufficient points? What’s that about? Let’s go back and take a look at the number of points needed. OK, click on $4.00, again. 3000 points needed! Wait, so that means that not only did I cut my earnings in half, they’ve now raised the amount for redemption, too?

Well, doesn’t that suck?



^*quota of contractually obliged use of internet slang reached for this post.