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Billy O'Keefe/Chronicle
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For no one else, there's Mastercard
It’s time for the credit card companies to pack their bookbags and go home |
You sad little thing. Take a look at youself.
You carry your books in a cheap nylon Mastercard bag. Your kitchen drawer has about 23 American Express water bottles in it, one of which works, another of which already had water inside when you got it. Your apartment is illuminated by some ridiculous floodlight-like contraption that runs on hearing aid batteries only, and those free candles you received "just for signing up" melted down faster than you can say D-E-B-T.
For all this, you can thank your friends(?) at the credit card companies. Because you signed up for one damaging piece of plastic after another, these are your free gifts, your little perks, your cute surprises.
In other words, junk like this is the upside to owning all these cards. It's as if someone wants you to know just what kind of mess you're limping into.
Maybe this is the credit companies’ way of lending an olive branch. Or maybe we're just dreaming.
Here at Columbia and other institutions of higher learning around the country, every day is a September day. Outside of every building, inside every lobby, in front of every remotely important door, there's some not-quite emcee, holding some 20-odd clipboards, commanding his good-looking cronies to lunge chest-first into students with promises of free gifts and orgasmic happiness.
Oftentimes, people are smart enough, seasoned enough or late enough for class to resist. But there's always a sucker following close behind, ready to trade away a good credit record for the right to see his or her name on something more official than a scantron.
Well so what, right? That's just typical new-school-year business. It happens every September. But it's now the middle of November, and nobody has gone anywhere. In fact, it looks like the rush won't let up until the snow comes down.
And why would it? Students are signing up in droves, if only to receive some stupid gift, unaware that they will soon be unceremoniously trapped into a vacuum of bills, outrageous interest rates, and eventually more lousy free gifts. Think you can just cut up a card and it'll all go away? Think again. They'll send you card after card until you -- or someone who gets their hands on one of these cards -- activates your account. Don't think it doesn't happen.
If you really need a credit card so bad, do yourself a favor: Ignore that girl with the Discover hat and clipboard (she doesn't want you anyway), and sign up for a traditional account by phone or through the company's Web site. If the big guys don't know you're a college student, they won't treat you like one. The upshot is a card with a manageable opening balance and a much lower interest rate. Use the money you save to buy a water bottle that actually works.
Columbia students haven't had even a day's break in almost two months of walking to and from school. There's a sale pitch on every block. And while peddlers are fighting hunger and Streetwise vendors are fighting for a good cause, Visa, Discover, American Express and Mastercard are merely fighting each other. These companies can surely afford a nice vacation, so it's high time they take one. |
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Views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Journalism Department or the college.
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