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?
Desperate or disparate?
Posted by: fumier | November 15, 2005 at 07:15 PM
Whoops - I corrected it!
Posted by: Chris | November 15, 2005 at 08:26 PM
If you could get extra cheese on your pizza if you used the card, I could see the attraction.
Posted by: fumier | November 16, 2005 at 12:22 PM
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.
Posted by: gunlaw | November 16, 2005 at 06:13 PM
It would be fine for parmesan, but I agree that mozarella could be a problem.
Posted by: fumier | November 16, 2005 at 09:21 PM
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?
Posted by: Argleblaster | November 17, 2005 at 12:44 AM
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?
Posted by: fumier | November 17, 2005 at 08:39 AM
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.
Posted by: gunlaw | November 18, 2005 at 03:41 PM
Our host is strangely silent on this cheese issue.
Posted by: fumier | November 18, 2005 at 05:16 PM