Marukai Market Moving To $1 One Time Membership Fee – Reduces Annual Fee On JCB Marukai To $15 Per Year

Marukai is a Japanese supermarket chain, they used to charge a $10 annual membership fee, they are replacing this with a one time fee of $1 for their shoppers card. Usually this would be of very little interest to us, but JCB issues the JCB Marukai card (along with the JCB Mitsuwa card) that earns up to 3% cash back on all purchases. The annual fee on this card is $15 and it also required having membership with Marukai bringing the total of $25 per year (both waived the first year). This change will mean you’re no longer charged the Marukai membership fee, bringing it to only $15 per year.

If you’re already a cardholder, you’ll be charged the $1 fee (see image below) when your next annual fee becomes due. Not sure if they just waive this fee for new cardholders as the $10 membership fee was previously waived the first year.

3% cash back on all purchases is pretty unheard of (Discover it Miles only offers that on the first year of being a card member). Although you do need to spend $3,000 before you get this rate and you actually earn 3 points per $100 in spend after reaching that spend requirement. The problem is spend is based on a per statement cycle, so if you made $199 in purchases in a month you’d only earn 3 points instead of almost 6 and that $99 in spend doesn’t transfer over to the next month.

Hat tip to blueshiftlabs on /r/churning & nrvn93 for the image above.