> Just a generic piece of life advice here: you can call up your credit card company and get the annual fee waved, for degrees of difficulty generally south of e.g. getting a bank to waive an overdraft fee.

Interesting. Would you consider it feasible to do so for a card you don't have yet (i.e. obtaining a new card without its associated annual fee), or would you only consider that plausible as an existing customer of such a card?

And does that apply to the large vendors (such as Amex or Chase), or only to smaller ones?