Credit Cards, Miles and Rounding
 

A recent thread here brought up something I've never considered.

Apparently, some credit/debit cards round UP purchases to the next even dollar. For example, $10.01 becomes $11.00 even for earning miles. I had thought every card truncated (rounded down).

Has anyone found any affinity cards that round up individual purchases for earning bonuses?

My impression was that most cards used aggragate purchases -- if you charged $1244.45 in a month, you get 1244 miles.

That is the way I've seen it with mine.

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Was it an early Superman movie where the villain discovered a way to be come filthy stinking rich by collecting all the partial pennies from rounding and truncating on various electronic tansactions?

I wonder if he could teach me how to do that with miles.

Superman III, yes.

My thoughts exactly.

Goes back way before that. A few payroll programmers back in the 60s, perhaps even the 50s, would round everyone's net pay down to the nearest penny and put the difference into their own check. It all balanced, so nobody noticed for a while. This is called the "salami method" - lots of thin slices add up to something. Lots of discussion in the IT press at the time. Too many checks and audits today to pull it off without involving a lot of people, at which point it's less worthwhile plus someone would talk.

Office Space :D


I had always assumed that the points were solely based on your monthly spend. (How they round...I never really cared.) I have three rewards cards - HH Amex, SPG Amex, and MR Visa.

From an IT perspective, it seems expensive to push points into an individual accumulator every time a transaction takes place. Far easier/cheaper to simply grab the monthly total at the time the batch job runs to build the outgoing file to the airline or hotel in question.