Originally Posted by lwildernorva

If you're going to call into question my ethics, you'd better know who I am. And you don't.

I call attention to errors made in my favor in restaurants, in hotels, and in many other areas of my life. I do not do this because I think I'm morally superior. I do this because I don't believe in taking advantage of those situations--and here's why. It's generally the poor person on the front line, who could be you, could be me, and who could've been my mother and father, who bears the brunt of that mistake, many times losing their jobs, or having to make good the money discrepancy out of their own pockets, or at the very least, being given some sort of reprimand that goes into their personnel record, I think unfairly, for their actions. And rarely is the guy in the front office who made the mistake in adopting the policy that results in this kind of action sanctioned in any way, and in fact, he generally gets a nice bonus if sending a targeted offer works out, despite the misinterpretations on the front lines. See, I've learned, consequences generally happen to folks on the front lines, like the folks who post on these boards, and not to the folks in the front offices.

I suspect the folks who frequent this board are looking to stretch their travel dollars, and for the most part, the folks in the front offices aren't really doing that.

My comments, however, are directed towards the attitude that we're all entitled to the free lunch when we know the free lunch was not directed to us. We know that these are targeted offers. Read the posts; many folks here are making calls to CSRs knowing we weren't targeted for the offers, but we make calls to include ourselves in the free lunch anyway. And, we're giddy when we get included, even saying silly things like this is a sign of good customer service when we know that this is way above and beyond good customer service.

I don't think there's anything wrong with making that attempt (even if I might not make it myself). I think there's a lot wrong with the gnashing of teeth that occurs when it's discovered that those who weren't supposed to get these offers, aren't going to get these offers.

I think the silliness of targeted offers becomes apparent in the direction this thread is going. Plenty of people who should be happy getting 50K off Chase are going to be plenty ticked because they won't get 100K. They won't get 100K because they weren't targeted, but they reasonably are bothered that Chase so quickly changed the rules of the game for a small targeted audience (without any sense of what the targeting was--look at some of the posts here and in other threads that talk about offers being made to one spouse and not the other).

In the end, wouldn't Chase have simply been better off making the 100K offer to everyone up front? But I think Chase and Amex and a number of other financial institutions are beginning to realize that you can't "bump the bonus" to hundreds or thousands of people without paying a significant financial price. We do a disservice to ourselves when we don't realize this potential economic reality.

There are two avenues to those who don't like this business practice. Stop dealing with Chase and cancel your accounts. Or sue them for a breach of contract and see how well your arguments stand up in court. In some states, those arguments may succeed because of the way the laws are written; in other states, not so much. And I think we all pretty much know that Chase isn't going to care if hundreds of us here cancel our cards over the failed promises their CSRs made.

And, if you aren't trying to get the free lunch when you ask for an extra 50K points never directly promised to you when you applied for an offer limited to 50K points, what are you trying to get?