Dear Credit Unions…
Dear Credit Unions,
We have to admit, sometimes we don’t know what to make of you. Especially when you look like a bundle of chumps who haven’t been playing the suckers nearly hard enough.
Don’t you know you’re missing out on big fat profits?
For example: your CU’s Platinum card probably has a perfectly sane rate around 10% or below, and you still have a 25 day grace period on purchases, and oh, yes — you haven’t been juggling the rules every few weeks or months to squeeze the last few pennies from your members.
It’s simple enough to fix — just insert a clause into your terms and conditions that allows you to change the terms and conditions at any time, without that pesky need to give notice.
Then use an intro rate as bait. Once the guppies are on the hook for a couple thou, tighten the line and reel ’em in. Grace periods? Gone. Late fees? Hike ’em. Too bad if they complain — it’s all laid out right there in our terms, and they willfully violated them. It’s their fault if they can’t read and didn’t bother to follow the procedure to obtain a current copy of the terms before each purchase. Over the limit? No problem — cover the charge as a “courtesy”, then tack on an over limit fee. Better hike that fee as well — income needs a little pumping up this month. Better make it apply to each charge, too.
Is it ethical? Who cares? With enough lawyers, anything is legal.
The sheeple never seem to complain much. If they don’t like it, all they have to do is write a check for their balance and close the account. Too bad if they don’t happen to have that kind of cash sitting around. Should have planned ahead.
I mean, you credit unions are just being silly. Your credit card terms actually fit on a single piece of paper, and they make sense to humans. What’s the point of that? Heck, most of you don’t even have a sky-high “default” rate, and what few fees you do have are actually reasonable.
That little thing called “ethics” that you claim to value seems to be costing you a lot of cash. It’s a shame, really.
But we do appreciate that you welcome all those pain-in-the-neck “smart” consumers, with all their silly questions and tendencies to look at the fine print. Thanks for taking them off our hands.
Don’t worry about us — we’ll just buy a few more TV ads and reel in even more. There’s an endless supply of suckers out there who have never heard the message that a CU will treat them better. As long as the rest of the sheeple don’t realize they have an ethical alternative, we’ll keep rolling in dough.
Sincerely,
United MegaBanks
(P.S.– Just don’t start telling the credit union story, OK?)
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