Something is seriously wrong with the distinction of gold and platinum cards. This stuff used to mean something. Ten years ago, a gold card was undeniably prestigious, requiring a huge income and the bravado/stupidity to buy multiple Ferraris on a whim.
And then gold cards got cheap. Every major credit card company got them, and began giving them to people who weren’t Andrew Carnegie. Or even Andrew McCarthy. ("Hi, I was in Weekend at Bernie's I and II. Make I take your order?") Gold became something not as valuable as gold.
So platinum cards got made. The only difference I can see between gold and platinum is that gold in more valuable in real life. Whoever initially designed the gold card didn’t foresee how commonplace it would be, so he or she picked the world’s best metal, and had to go with a less exalted metal. Silver and bronze are out, obviously, since the Olympics has solidly built the reputation of how those three are stacked (they’re probably one of the reasons gold was picked in the first place) so they had to go to platinum.
Whoever picked platinum was, sadly, a Dungeons and Dragons freak. In that game, platinum is more valuable than gold, and you can carry more money with platinum pieces without weighing down your character. If this guy was still in charge, the next metal up would be electrum, a fictional D&D metal which is more valuable than platinum. Or maybe latinum, the Star Trek fictional money metal, which is the only metal that the replicators can't replicate.
If you recognized any of the source material for the preceding paragraph, let me take this opportunity to yell GEEK CHECK! at you. If not, feel free to yell GEEK CHECK! at me for knowing so much about embarrassingly nerdy elements.
Following the gold pattern, platinum cards got cheap. Prime example: I got one, for free, no less. The new card metal is titanium, which is real life is less precious than platinum or gold. In five years, it should be up to pewter or aluminum.
This is all just an attempt to woo regular people into thinking they're royalty with these cards. SUV ads have people driving up mountains, and most of them are used as station wagons. Cigarette ads have people laughing in front of a green background, and most smokers can't stress their lungs like that. Metal cards show people buying exotic vacations and helicopters, while they're used for the routine dental check-ups and Labor Day sales at JCPenney. And dammit if I didn't send in my application as soon as I got it.
I don’t have any sort of credit card buying problem. Some people don’t equate the card with actual money; it’s just free stuff and more free stuff and something about not getting the home loan approved a few years down the line. When I buy something with the card, I just see it as paying an extra sixty cents or so on the purchase, so I don’t use it unless I don’t have enough cash to cover it. I don't buy anything I can't immediately pay off (except that whole college thing), so I always have a zero balance. I don’t equate Atlantic City with winning money either.
Quick tips for maintaining credit cards. 1. Never accept a card that has a yearly fee. You can do better. 2. Pay off the card as soon as you get the statement. If you can't, try to pay off a smaller one completely, and then cancel that card or cut it up or something. 3. If you have a Diner's Club card, find your time machine and go back to 1974 when that thing was accepted somewhere. That's about all I know.
Assume for a second I have a deserving credit record and fully earned this preapproved card. It’s hard to imagine, but go with it for a bit. If so, then the platinum card still has a bit of dignity.
As tough as that image as for you to generate, let me shatter it. I’ve used my one current card, a Mastercard with a cool lightning bolt on it, five times before getting all these platinum offers. Based on that, these five purchases represented the upscale, sophisticated consumer that your finer metallics go to.
The first use was on back in college, on a spring break trip to Boston. I bought a ten dollar book on the historical accuracy of films because I was flat broke and it was a good deal. I still haven’t read it. The bill came to home instead of college, and Mommy and Daddy paid it for me. A few weeks later, I got a notice saying my credit had been tripled. For ten bucks that I didn't even pay for.
The second one was also a ten dollar book, this time Joseph Campbell’s classic Hero of a Thousand Faces. I've actually read this one, sorta. The bookmark hasn’t moved for several months now, but it's solidly in the middle of the book. This purchase got me in trouble, since I had to pay the bill for the first time. All that stuff the IRS and the phone company and other billers have about your bill being postmarked by the due date, that don’t mean squat to credit card companies. By the due date, the check can’t be postmarked, or anywhere near a post office. It has to be in their hand, with a PLEASE DEPOSIT ME YOU MONEY HOARDER on the memo. Otherwise, big fat twenty five dollar late fee. I learned from that, and got the check for the late fee in a few days earlier that month. But not early enough, so big fat twenty five dollar late fee #2. Third time was the charm, when I realized that the ten dollar book had now cost me sixty bucks, and would go to eighty five if I didn’t pay the damn thing now.
The first two times I didn’t have a checking account, so I had to bum checks from people. It’s like asking to borrow shoelaces; it's either not a problem in the least, or it's such a stupid request you should be run over with a tractor for asking. I finally got a checking account, and proceeded to buy a whole mess of business type clothes, and tried paying with a starter check. Starter checks come in a premade packet with no name or anything on it, and each check shows a different design possibility. I forget if I tried to pay with the Bugs Bunny or the puppies in a meadow or the seascape, but whatever picture it was wasn’t cute enough, since the store didn’t accept starter checks. I should have used the baby chicks, teddy bear and Nermal check. So out came the lightning bolt for purchase #3. That one came on the same statement as big fat late fee number two, so I wrote a monster check (monster for a newborn checking account, that is) and got rid of the whole thing.
My first and only online purchase was #4, the Onion book from Amazon.com. If a friend or a nobly-caused web page you go to has a Amazon.com link, buy stuff by going through them. That web site gets a little cut of the profit. It’s about a dime, but it’s free money for the people you like. Same with a lot of other web purchases, so use those friends' links.
My fifth was a bit of a panic. I went grocery shopping, with a big fat stack of coupons. Being a cheap bastard when it comes to little stuff, I love coupons, and since I was at an Edwards, I had double coupons. The piddling crap I got off was now double piddling crap. But double piddling crap can still fill up a cart. When I got there, the bill came to a little over a hundred. And I had eighty bucks cash on me, thinking only someone feeding one of those 900 pound guys who eat a whole pig every three days would be spending more than eighty bucks on groceries. So I said a quick prayer and handed over my card, knowing that if for some reason this didn't work, I'd have to put some of the cart back. Putting something from the cart back is like standing up to give a book report and saying that you couldn't finish reading the book (Hero of a Thousand Faces, let's say). But the card worked, my fears were unfounded, my bowel unclenched, and I fed my fat guy.
And right there you have the credit of one of the most sought after consumers in the world. If I'm the future credit cards are looking to, hang onto those metal cards to make yourself a happy little shack once the economy craps out. They're handing out pre-approvals with Slim Jims as far as I know.
If you're looking for a meaningless status symbol and you haven't yet tapped into the credit card world, don't worry. They'll find you. By my logic, they've sending applications out to everyone with last names A-R now, so the rest of you should either have something in the mail or will soon for a Tin or Lithium card. And then you'll all be as high class and high-falutin' as me.
P.S. I am writing this barefoot, surrounded by dirty clothes, comic books and generic brand Cheeze-Its. Show that in a platinum commercial.