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"