Also, a lot of folks end up carrying a balance in spite of their best intentions.
I suspect this happens relatively often even for folks with a long history of not doing so - e.g. maybe you get fired for the first time and start running up a balance, not long before you've run up some significant interest charges.
And then there's huge credit card bonuses like $150 for Chase Freedom which is like $7.5k of spending's worth...
But again, that doesn't really answer my question. I very much realize lots of people do pay interest. But there are also people who don't, and possibly never have, for many years. I'm asking why do they keep those people around as customers if they're literally losing money on them? To me the obvious answer is they're still bringing value, and the only realistic form that can take as I see it seems to be their transaction data.
https://www.magnifymoney.com/blog/best-of/10-best-5-cash-bac...
This way they'll make money after the limit takes effect. My assumption is that they are hoping the consumer will forget there's a hard limit to the amount they can save and always go with their "5% cash back card" when making purchases.
Fun fact: you can pay your US tax return with a credit card for a ~1.5% fee.
So, by encouraging the use of credit cards for smaller and smaller transactions, the credit card companies take a bigger and bigger bite from the merchant.
That's all on top of any annual fees and interest charges that the credit card companies hit the customer with.
