American Express

Credit and charge card company.

The charge cards are neat in that they have no limit on them, but a contractual obligation to pay them off each month, which makes them neat to give to employees for expenses. And you can get different coloured ones.

The credit cards have a slight flaw (at least in the UK). They give you money back (cool) - something like 1% gets credit back to the card of the year's spend. However, next to nowhere takes them because Amex charge higher commission to cover this. Even places that take the Amex charge cards have issues with the Blue credit card...

-- KatieLucas

They send out huge quantities of junk mail inviting one to apply for their card.

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It's not quite true that the cards have no limit. In fact, they do have a limit; they just don't tell you what it is. They determine the limit dynamically by doing a credit check on you every time you use the card.

• Do they actually pull a credit bureau each and every time? Does that not impair the credit worthiness of frequent users since frequent pulls are a negative factor in many credit scoring alogorithms?
• No, they just refuse the transaction. But they can still claim there's no limit, because you can call them back and argue with them, and convince them to allow the transaction after all. I did this several times about 20 years ago, so that's not hypothetical, although I don't know if their system works the same today (presumably it does, though).

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