| Why do they bother?
It doesn't take a genius to know that at this time of year the marketing for financial services goes into overdrive.
Hordes of junk mail waiting on your doormat with offers like "consolidate all your Christmas debt into one easy loan". I've been down that route when I was young and foolish (well even more foolish then) so this type of thing doesn't appeal. This morning I had three of these "offers", the cheapest being Alliance and Leicester at 5.9% APR. Then I opened one from Barclaycard. Apart from the fact that it had conditions like penalty clauses for early payment the interest rate was 18.9% APR.
What amuses me is that it's signed by the personal loans manager, or some such role, which leads me to imagine that Barclaycard have got a whole department of people working on stuff that's so ludicrously uncompetitive that no-one in their right minds is going to buy it. But even more bemusing is that you just know that the 'one born every minute' rule will kick in and enough people will buy it to make Barclaycard a heap of money and keep all these people who seem devoid of any notion of market research in a job.  |