A Wal-Mart Store Card Credit builder that gave 5% cash back would be a great product for a lot of people, and just as worthy of “celebration” as this Amazon card.

I don’t have any problems with store cards in general. I see them as a mutually beneficial agreement between retailers and frequent customers. It allows the retailer to capture a portion of the transaction revenue that would normally go to a third party (and some extra data about the customer), and in return pass on some of the savings to the customer in the form of discounts and rewards.

You need Prime to get the 5%. Prime costs $119/year. You would need to spend $2,380 or nearly $200/mo just to make it worthwhile.

Sorry; that’s not a good product at all.

> You need Prime to get the 5%. Prime costs $119/year.

There are loopholes to this that make Prime much cheaper though.

For example, Prime Student [1] is $6.49/month or $59/year.

The EBT subsidized Prime membership mentioned elsewhere in the thread is $5.99/month (no annual discount).

You can also use Amazon Household [3] on an existing Prime membership to qualify multiple people in the household as Prime members. All members get the 5% benefit, not just the card holder. I doubt this stacks on the student version but it definitely does on vanilla Prime and likely on the subsidized version as well.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Student/b?node=668781011

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/l/16256994011

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/myh/households

> Prime costs $119/year. You would need to spend $2,380 or nearly $200/mo just to make it worthwhile.

This assumes that one won't make use of their Prime benefits.

My last two years living in the US I spent about $3500/year at Amazon. This works out to $175/year cash back, and $105 more than my main credit card would have yielded at 2% cash back. That was enough for me to spend a few minutes applying for and setting up the card, and I was happy with the product.

You factor in the cost of the Prime membership in the break-even calculation, but as someone else noted, that does not count the value of other Prime benefits. I was already a Prime member when the store card was introduced, which means I was valuing those benefits at ~$120/yr on their own.

Different people have different shopping needs/preferences. I have no trouble conceiving of the idea that what might be a good value to me might not be for someone else. In your case, I wonder how you are able to say "Sorry; that’s not a good product at all" with such conviction when there are so many people out there (~100 million) with Prime memberships in the US.