Happy

I dont understand how the 7x calculation arrives? Care to elaborate such?

Each person's situation is different. My usage of the card does not justify the AF.. It also depends on how desperately you need MR pts.

Here are the reasons applied to me, why the card is not worth keeping.

1) I have NO USE of the $100 airline credit. In the past on various AMEX cards this has turned into airline GCs that I have not used them even once - they just sit there. Because 95% of our trips are international, in business class or first class awards, hence no airline incidentals. For the rare domestic trips, we still have airline transportation vouchers to use, that I finally managed to whittle them dowm from many K's to less than 1K. Sometimes literally "squandered" them, like a $650 r/t fare to Vancouver, or a $450 r/t to Chicago... We have no need to check bag. Even we check bag, airline status / credit card cover that.
So the $100 airline credit is truly worthless to us, translate to, no offsetting -even before this mechanism died.

2) Several local grocers we shop at, never being recognized by AMEX as grocery stores, therefore need to call to get adjustment. It is that way on Everyday and on HH. AMEX never fixes that, despite the billing is thru the grocer itself, and shown on statement as such, with grocery store description. It gets old after a few months doing so. TD Visa / Chase Visa have no issue recognize that. True TD Visa only earns 2x but TD has no AF, no Forex fee, and earns category reward worldwide long before the recent change Gold has.
And no, the mainstream grocery stores here do not carry meaningful Gebits that many of you are very giddy about. Not possible in South Florida.

3) Over 50% of our dining expenses are spent on international trips. A vast numbers of restaurants in Australia and Asia do NOT take AMEX. only Visa or MC. Some only Visa. In fact last Fall in Brisbane a Japanese sushi restaurant that is at the top of TripAdvisor and very near the brand new Westin, has a big sign right below the register counter - 3% discount if paid by Cash. Only accept Visa, no discount.
Many Hong Kong restaurants that are popular local names, only take cash or Octopus, the equivalent of cash because it is the card you load money to, use to pay all kinds of public transportation forms as well as accepted as payment form in thousands of shops.
Therefore, even the Gold FINALLY earn category bonus internationally, it does not help very much.

4) the Grubhub benefit is worthless in our area. We dont use restaurant delivery - no such need nor any good restaurants on the list. Ruth Chris is 50 miles away. Cheesecake Factory is 12 miles away, either location. I am not going to drive this far just to take advantage of $10 statement credit though some of you may, not to mention neither one is place we go normally.

5) I have enough MR balance that I dont feel the need to essentially "Buy" 20K pts with $195 - the retention offer essentially boils down to that. Some of you seeing throwing $50 to the drain, I see it throwing $195 for adding more pts on top of an already enough balance that the last usage of such was 2 years ago - transferred some to Aeroplan, together with 2 Marriott Travel Package redemption, that we used to redeem a mini RTW trip of US-EU-Australia-Asia-US. Given Air Canada bought Aeroplan and the mini RTW is no more (they just announced it would eliminate 1 stopover on an international round trip redemption), with lots are up in the air for 2020, I dont see any immediate need to accumulate MR aggressively. I also have the Business Plus that earns 2x on everything, large expenses can easily earn a lot of MR if putting on that card. Saying that also because we have sizable balances in other programs, UR, UA, AA, even DL.

Many of you may not realize, BonVoy business card earns the same 4x at restaurants, and earns such rate overseas from Day One it became BonVoy from SPG. The AF went up from $95 to $125 - for that you receive an annual FN cert of Category 5 (35K category). No need to play the airline credit game, and the FN worth a lot more than the AF. We will be using 2 such FNs in the upcoming trip at Hong Kong - the lowest rates are $400+ during the period of our stay.

6) For whatever reason I received targeted offers every now and then - this is the 3rd Gold that is from a targeted offer, came within 6 months after I Xed the previous one, also from a targeted offer. In fact yet another targeted offer came during the first 3 months holding the current Gold. All the targeted offers have 1st year fee waived, including this one.
Who knows, may be down the road there would be another targeted offer coming. If so, great. If not, shrug.

Posting the above personal thought in hope that may help some readers to do a more in depth analysis on cost and benefits, when it comes to card renewal / cleaning up of card ownership.

I welcome any counter points to the above. That can be constructive to help everyone.