Ego Caressing

Hi to everyone, Euroswydd here. I feel compelled to add my personal thoughts on the subject of ‘ego caressing’. This is actually my term as far as I know but it describes to a T the tactics employed by the mass marketers of the 21st century.
Reading diary entries of a forty-seven year old woman whose life had, for years, been confined by financial burdens-yes, they still used cash in those days, that remarkably primitive means of accessing the necessities of life-I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Her description of the following blatant ploy perpetrated by her credit card company defied rational belief.
She writes and I quote:
“So what did my enterprising credit card company do…they rewarded me… I have been upgraded to Platinum status and will soon find a rectangle of freshly cut plastic in my mailbox. It will be a different color than the gold one I have now with the same account number and interest rate (so I wonder to myself… this is such a wonderful thing because?). I have been rewarded with this dubious honor because I am ‘one of their best customers’. You bet I am. After years of reliably relinquishing my limited funds in an attempt to keep going until I could pay them off I had achieved the unthinkable…a zero balance. No longer do I have to spend hundreds of dollars each month in the form of interest fees for the privilege of using their card to keep food on the table, clothes on our backs (and fronts) and an insured car on the road.
I’ve managed to get out from under and in addition to being granted a grey-they maintain platinum but it just looks grey to me-card I will now earn ‘points’ when I use it. Ostensibly with enough accumulation of points I can buy “free” merchandise at specified retailers. Depending on my spending proclivities and my desire to acquire enough points to get a $25.00 Home Depot Gift Card, a $50 Barnes and Noble Gift Card or a $100 Circuit City Gift Card -I picked from the list those that I would actually pick in real life- I am being encouraged to once again run up a credit card balance where I will be paying them much more in interest that I would receive from any points ‘rewards’ I might accrue.
These altruistic companies aren’t trying to create a situation where I will need to pay interest you say? That I can always simply pay off my previous month’s extravagances and avoid the morass of high percentage rates and still enjoy the perks of points acquisition?
Of course I can…but is anyone actually naïve enough to think that’s the scenario the credit card issuers are banking on?