I can’t think of even ONE instance where a change to policies, legislation, manufacturing, shipping, or anything else that resulted in lower costs has ever been passed on to consumers outside of co-ops like Costco and REI.
Exactly this. I’m pretty sure the CC companies themselves are behind this legislation. “We wanted to give you perks for using our card, but it’s illegal now. Oh BTW, completely unrelated, your interest rate and annual fees will remain the same. If you don’t like it, then just pay everything off before the annual fee hits again next month. Ta-ta!”
There are uses for it. They can track the average mood of an entire room over a period of time. If you use that somewhere like a restaurant, or a banquet venue, then that information can be useful for tweaking the policies, environment, prices, etc. Of course an actual human could do this too, just by being there. I think it’ll get the most use at places like casinos where they’re always using psychological tricks to make people want to gamble. Ironically I don’t think that “happy” is the mood they’ll be aiming for.
What’s crazy is that this was already fully functional and in-use at least 8 years ago. Idk how this has stayed out of the headlines until now. Microsoft had a working demo of this in their visitor center in 2015 and was already using it in multiple places.
They get tax breaks from the city to maintain a minimum occupancy. The cities were waiving those requirements during covid, and now they’re not. It’s that simple. The government and the corpos want their extra money from your pocket and they’re insisting on behavior that will get it for them.
That was actually a study that was completely misrepresented by the media. What the people actually said in the study is that if they were presented with an unexpected expense of $500, they would charge it, not that they didn’t have the money. But then unscrupulous mukrakers took that study and reported it as “50% of Americans say they don’t have enough cash to cover an unexpected $500 expense!”. There are plenty of valid reasons to charge an unexpected expense, regardless of how much money you have in the bank.
Does that mean you receive that much as a refund on your taxes, or is that much a write-off? Write-offs are worthless if you don’t itemize and have enough write-offs to surpass the standard deduction.