American Express Won’t Offer Anything For Small Business Saturday This Year

American Express has traditionally offered cardholders a discount on Small Business Saturday every year (first Saturday after Thanksgiving). Past promotions have been as follows:

American Express are still actively promoting Small Business Saturday on November 25th this year but they have confirmed with DansDeal that there will be no promotion this year. Small Business Saturday was always used by American Express to try and help improve their acceptance rates with smaller businesses. Accepting American Express cards has traditionally carried higher fees for businesses than say Visa or Mastercard. Acceptance rates have greatly improved for American Express, so it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that they are cutting promotions for Small Business Saturday. I still have some blind faith that they will offer some sort of targeted bonus.

It’s also worth mentioning they did have a small business offer earlier this year, but that has now expired. They are also still offering bonuses in other countries:

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eli232
eli232 (@guest_514721)
November 13, 2017 17:13

Sounds worth to move to UK

Jonathan
Jonathan (@guest_514635)
November 13, 2017 14:58

We Cant expect Amex to do anything especially when they are founding partners of small business sat. What does that even mean? They created it and encourage it but wont participate in it, sounds familiar.. Guys, they dont make enough money. We should all be lucky enough to have the privilege of using them. They need our help to survive, it’s a tough time for Amex. They only made net 1.3 billion which was a net loss (https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/19/american-express-earnings-q2-2017.html).

Poor Amex, 1.3 Billion net profit is horrible.. We def cant expect you to give back to the thing you created. Im with you amex.. Lets aim for 13 billion net profit 2018..

Albrecht
Albrecht (@guest_514626)
November 13, 2017 14:39

Their offers are mostly junk nowadays too. Change in marketing strategy is pretty obvious.

mny
mny (@guest_514588)
November 13, 2017 13:36

wow, painful day.
Discover Card rates to merchants must be expensive too, many smaller grocery stores around here don’t take them and somehow Hooters still doesn’t take Discover.
Thanks for the post DofC

PT
PT (@guest_514975)
November 14, 2017 03:16

Interesting!

For me, there are no issues with Discover OR Amex at grocery stores of any size, from several small family-run grocery stores to big chains. I did see one grocery outlet store location once though that didn’t take all 4, but it was Amex they didn’t take.

It is restaurants where I know 3 places they take Amex but NOT Discover:
locally-owned higher end restaurant
locally-owned burger place (nothing fancy)
Panera Bread – Discover worked there in 2016, but not in 2017; cashier verified this when she refused it & the window stickers by the door were updated to not show Discover

Discover claimed in 2013 that 98% of all merchants in US that take Visa/MC aso take Discover.

Daniel
Daniel (@guest_521422)
November 22, 2017 01:17

Hm… It’s my understanding that Discover used to charge high rate, but now their rate is comparable to Visa and Mastercard.

Flame
Flame (@guest_514509)
November 13, 2017 11:18

Can’t say they are wrong to do this – They gave a lot of freebies and we have “abused” it in the past. Personally, my spend with Amex has been coming down year on year- I still love their offers and spend continues to be around these specific offers they have.

Dan
Dan (@guest_514521)
November 13, 2017 11:37

My spend on amex is exclusively for sign up bonuses and Amex offers. With the horror stories of shutdowns, I dont even have enough trust to keep a sizable reward balance with amex, for fear it will be taken away

DoCuser
DoCuser (@guest_514573)
November 13, 2017 13:06

What are the reasons for shutdowns? Are you fearing Amex points clawback or accounts shutdown specifically?

Parkerthon
Parkerthon (@guest_514611)
November 13, 2017 14:06

If you do legitimate spend, they won’t target you. I’ve done amex offers for some time, scaled out a bit even. Saved thousands at a time. No issues. I just don’t abuse it to the extreme(e.g. 99 authorized users) or scam it.

DoCuser
DoCuser (@guest_514572)
November 13, 2017 13:02

So which cards are using mostly for your spend? any reasons behind that?

My personal opinion is as long as someone is getting benefit from amex offers and/or signup bonus, he/she should keep using their cards to a certain extent outside of offers situations.I believe this will help to maintain these offers in the long run

Ferris
Ferris (@guest_514491)
November 13, 2017 10:55

Few small businesses even have AMEX anyways…

Adam
Adam (@guest_515779)
November 15, 2017 06:03

Paypal Here have it if you know what I mean. 😉

Ed
Ed (@guest_514471)
November 13, 2017 10:18

Cheapskates.

Gina
Gina (@guest_514470)
November 13, 2017 10:12

Was trying to read between the lines of them just mentioning it on their website…

Steve
Steve (@guest_514468)
November 13, 2017 10:07

Well screw AMEX then