The credit card business in Hong Kong is incredibly competitive.  There’s no need to pay an annual subscription – most cards offer one or more years free, and then you just have to threaten to cancel to get them to waive the annual fee.

Apart from the introductory gifts there are a variety of special offers, some of which seem to make no sense at all.  For example, DBS is offering a $20 coupon for every $60 you spend at Pizza Hut.  The coupon is only valid for about two weeks, but when you use it there is no minimum spending requirement. 

However, the part I find truly puzzling is that they are going to so much trouble to encourage customers to use their credit cards when they have a pizza delivered, when I’d have thought that would be the very last thing they would want.  Surely they want the drivers to take cash and get back for the next delivery, not spend time taking an imprint of the customer’s credit card.

On top of that, DBS give you 90 days credit on your $80 pizza.

Desperate or what? 

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10 responses to “Play your cards right”

  1. fumier avatar

    Desperate or disparate?

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  2. Chris avatar

    Whoops – I corrected it!

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  3. fumier avatar

    If you could get extra cheese on your pizza if you used the card, I could see the attraction.

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  4. gunlaw avatar
    gunlaw

    But using your card to put extra cheese onto the pizza would make it tricky next time to fit the card into an ATM if some of the cheese had stuck to the card (which is highly likely). I foresee terrible problems with such a use.

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  5. fumier avatar

    It would be fine for parmesan, but I agree that mozarella could be a problem.

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  6. Argleblaster avatar
    Argleblaster

    In these days of killer plagues, should one even be thinking of spreading cheese with an implement which has seen the inside of a public orifice?

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  7. fumier avatar

    Perhaps the HK smart ID card, which is issued with a very nice protective envelope, would be more suitable. The question is, should it be used in the envelope, or removed for cheese spreading?

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  8. gunlaw avatar
    gunlaw

    Using a smart Hong Kong ID card for cheeze-spreading is pushing the envelope. Cheek-spreading perhaps but otherwise it is utterly obvious that the real issue is which bank – which is where mine host came in.

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  9. fumier avatar

    Our host is strangely silent on this cheese issue.

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  10. OrdinaryGweilo.com avatar

    Play your cards wrong

    I just knew this would happen. After being given 90 days credit for my pizza, I forgot to pay the bill when it eventually arrived. So the nice people at DBS charged me HK$150 late fee and HK$10 finance charges.

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