Re: reward credit card vs regular credit card
It's a tug of war between credit card companies and retail stores. It's a bit complicated, but I will try and explain. I won't go into the details, but give an overview and you can ask more questions if you want.
Basically, retail stores get charged differently depending on how you pay for a transaction. If you pay by debit card, the stores only have to pay $0.20 to the bank. If you sign, however, the tranaction goes through the credit card companies and the retail stores have to pay about 1.9% of the transaction cost in fees. On a $100 purchase, the fee difference would be $0.20 or $1.90. Multiply that by millions of transaction and you are talking a huge amount of money going to the banks or the retail stores depending on how you pay.
With this being the case, credit card companies and banks want you to sign for your purchases while retail stores want you to use your pin number. To encourage you to sign, banks often give rewards for signing instead of using your PIN and now also charge you a fee for using the PIN
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