WHAT'S IN YOUR WALLET?

News has come out that DISCOVER CARD may be NO MORE ...

Well, the company is being purchased by CAPITOL ONE card.

Wait - 

in the 70s when Discover first came onto the market, my father refused to allow them to be used in his branch of the company ... apparently since he was in the retail side of things he had the say so as to which credit cards they used.

He said the Discover card wanted way too much in "credit card fees" on the stores side -- did you know that stores have to pay a percentage to ACCEPT a credit card? -- so he would only accept Visa, MC, and Amex ... the fees were much more in-line with small businesses and it seemed that everyone who used cards for such things had them ...

this was back when people still wrote checks for most things, which meant they had cash in their bank accounts.

Then came the change in the business ... the company hired a NEW VP for my father's department (oh, don't get me going on this one) and heow wha brought the Discover Card in ... paid nearly twice as much per transaction as the other cards when used ... but you know what?

But the card really hasn't been around for all that long ... at least not that I'm aware of ... it could be longer.

Capital one has been around even shorter of a time .... that reads awkwardly ... I didn't start seeing commercials for them until about 20 years ago, at most, and they've always seemed kind of an "iffy" card to me.

They just seem like one of these companies that would get into the whole cyber-coin business ... or take the Enron way of doing things ... for you younger folk (like there's any younger folk reading this, lol), Enron was the FTX of the early 2000s ...

A little research, via Siri - I admit it, I didn't do a ton of research on this one - I found that it actually makes sense for Discover card to be looking at selling itself.

You see Discover is part of the Sears company ... yup, Discover the softer side of Sears ... nad while, by what Siri says, it started in the 80s ... and it could be, I only worked as a temp for my father during the summers when his secretary went on vacation, I thought the card was older than that.

Sears was doing great - it had survived the Great Depression, it survived both World Wars, as well as Korea & Vietnam ... it even survived the Inflation Crunch of the 70s - it was doing great ... so many memories, which I am going to try NOT to tangent into here ... 

Somewhere along the line, KMart -- don't see too many, if any, of those opened anymore, for a reason -- Some How managed to scrape up enough money - see K-Mart was really struggling at the time -- and BOUGHT  Sears.

Its kind of like the Dollar Tree buying up Walmart ... it could happen, but really not likely ... 

So when people talked, still do actually, about the merger, they often say that Sears bought KMart ... Nope just the opposite.

Needless to say, KMart - who was pretty desprite for money, even more so now - began to start shutting down a bunch of the locations ... both Sears and KMart.

They were in terrible debt ... So now, most of the Sears are closed (I want to say there are only 22 Sears stores remaining in the USA ... actually more than I thought ... ony 12 KMart stores ... brrrrr ... Sears used to be HUGE ... stupid K-Mart!

Actually, because of K-Mart, Montgomery Wards died ...  but that's a whole different/other post.

Right now we are talking Credit Cards ...

So Discover Card used to be OUR goto card -- everytime we charged on it, we got "money back" which we could use as part of our monthly payments ... it was just a really good system for us as a young (stupid) married couple.

Their rates were lower than most other cards and they didn't have any fees to have the card - most other cards had you pay to keep the card, although some would wave the fee if you purchased on the card within a year and paid them off on time.

Then a bunch of crap happened which shook the financial world ... little bits at a time ... and Discover card became the new "Diner's Club" bard.

Everyone knew about it, but no one actually saw it being used anywhere.

So now Captial One is looking to purchase Discover card ... my question is  ... why??

I may have to tune into to Fox Business channel to keep an eye on things ... I'm just worried that this might be another case of Sears-Kmart ... where the one with the horrid credit rating is buying up the one with the better credit rating.

This is worth keeping an eye on ... 

And if you have a balance on Discover -- consider the implications of this merger ...

I'm not sure how it will work, actually.

Like I said ... Fox Business ((find it more reliable than CNBC)