We have enough and more of proverbs, so many around to warn us of evils that our yet to befall on us .like the free lunch one, yet I fell for the cash back offer of our Desi MNC bank-ICICI .
Their cash back offer was so tempting which on hind sight I feel was legalised Gambling.
The promo went on like this, you need to spend a min of 2000 a month and then the user gets a certain percentage of the amount spent using the card corresponding to the number, the authorisation code in the slip, added up to .
so if your number in the slip added up to say 9 then you would get 50% or so of the amount spent. so far so good.
i did manage to get 1% and sometimes 3% in the 6 months the scheme was in vogue. and slept peacefully at the thought of how big corporates come out with such interesting schemes to add more colour to our lives .
Now the FREE LUNCH PART
When I casually glanced through my statement [you bet I found time becoz August has more holidays compared to the last few months] i found that whenever the cash back thing happened the reward points went missing to that effect. a day light robbery by all standards. although the eternal optimist in me was not ready to accept it. As a result of which and with the hope that our banks won’t be so cut throat as them I gained some courage to call up the customer service, only to confirm that there are infact no free lunches.
May be they just took the ancient indian saying" your left hand should not know what your right hand Gives"and remixed it to "** the customer should not know the reward points pay for your discounts"