Why I love the new Barclaycard Arrival+

Yeah bitches! It’s time! Time to pimp that affiliate card of mine. I guarantee (if you have half a brain at least) that you will learn something from this post.  You won’t learn about TripIT Pro, which I think comes with this (or is it the Discover card? I have a link for that too, have at it) I don’t know where it came from, but I do have an account with TripIT which is amazing I think (full disclosure I don’t really understand what it is).   I think you might also get a free FICO score from this card, or is that a different card too?  I really don’t know to be honest, click my link and let me know.

What I can tell you is the old arrival card looks like a washed out piece of crap, and the new one looks like a gleaming piece of metal.  Of course it isn’t metal, not like the other amazing card the Chase Sapphire Preferred, but it is pretty awesome, and I have a story for you about why.

This card is Blue, just like the CSP. It isn’t metal, because they couldn’t run to that sort of cost, but it does have something really neat -the sandwich layer – it is a light blue rather than a plain vanilla (we all know what we think of Vanilla and our wallets eh?) the only other time I saw a funky color on a card was the Chase Freedom card that has the cheese of the sandwich in moldy green.  Check out (my slimmed down wallet) and see if you can spot the Arrival and the Freedom:

The Freedom got me everytime.  I would dig into my overloaded wallet for the Fidelity Amex, see green, and pull out the damn Freedom Card. Actually more often than not this quarter that was great, because it had 5x on Dining,even on First Fridays where you could earn a whopping 60% of that if you held the Sapphire Preferred!

Stop being such a big girls blouse

A card, a car, a house, a watch, a pair of sneakers – they don’t impress anyone, they aren’t the secret to success. If you walk into a store and are treated like crap by people – leave. If you are so insecure that you need to pull out the shiny blue plastic (or silvery plastic, or a bar of solid gold) then you are in the wrong store.

The cultured among you might remember the seminal artistic movie Pretty Woman, where the hooker is treated like a hooker because, well, she is a hooker, but then her John comes along with a platinum card and they treat her like royalty.  You don’t have to be the hooker. Unless of course you want to.

Timing the transaction, for result, or for ego

I have a dear friend who is very wealthy, self made man and all that, but also weirdly insecure.  He told me a story of walking into a store in the UK called Church’s (they sell nice shoes) and that they ‘challenged him’ by stating as he entered that there was nothing here under “four hundered pounds.” (sic)   he was so threatened by their supposition that he was in the wrong place that he bought two pairs of shoes instead of just browsing.

What he did was get the ego involved, he walked out having ‘shown them’ but also what he did is walk out buying two pairs of shoes when he may have only wanted one, and he may have liked none.  The ego is at play here.  An ego is actually a great thing to have if controlled properly, you can leverage it to achieve impact in transactions, but if you allow it to lead you, you are destined for failure.

The common problem is that many people pull out the ‘fancy card’ be it the new arrival+, or the CSP, or the Amex Plat, or the Centurion, or whatever the level is to you to make it ‘important’ and use it to cover their inadequacy.

Act strong when you are weak, and weak when you are strong – Sun Tsu

Here’s a funny thing, and I hope it conveys.  If you are threatened to your core by a checkout person, then you are weak, acting strong by showing a swanky card at the end of the deal actually achieves nothing. You will find yourself trying to ‘prove yourself’ to a clerk.  The quote by Sun Tsu is very important, but you must understand also that it needs to be placed into context.  You need to act weak in front of the clerk, not strong, because the battle isn’t’ about your ego.

The battle in a transaction is to win on price vs what you will receive.  If you were to walk into an expensive store and feel threatened by glances or comments then you lose- because the ‘war’ that we are making an art of is not for our ego. The war in this situation is a very narrow, segmented transaction, and pulling out a shiny card and paying double is not a win.

Conclusion

I hope that you too will note the design differences of these cards, and think to the psychology behind such changes.  I hope that you can make smart financial decisions without the doubt that brands and marketing will try to exploit from you. In an effort to help this I broke from my rule, and included some arrows, but I refuse to go so far as to include circles:

Think.