My renewed credit card arrived recently so I called to activate it. And I spoke with a human being. Credit card companies, among others, have become good over the last few years at leveraging their time on the phone with people.  They attempt to up-sell and cross-sell. They also do research into their customers which makes them smarter.

On this call the woman was doing research and she asked me a simple question: “you’ve been a  card member for a long time, what’s one thing you like about the card?’

A good question.

Radio silence on my end.

It’s a card.

I have it because I have it. There may be a few practical reasons why I have this card vs. any other —- none of which run very deep. But I realized, in my moment of silence, that I have no feelings at all towards the card.

Credit cards are commodities really… like a lot of products.

But they needn’t be. And probably shouldn’t be. If I ran the company and the graph on the answer to the question had a high number of “huh?”s, “I dunno”s and “whatever”s, I’d want to do something about it.

BTW, the card in the matrix above is not my (apparently rather generic) card brand. That’s an actual generic card graphic by kjelle20.