I used to be a loyal Discover credit card user, but I ended up running into two main problems. The first is the bit more obvious one that had begun ever since I first created a Discover credit card, and it is that Discover is not accepted in as many places as Visa and Mastercard. Discover claims a rate of 97% merchant acceptance, except I’ve run into that 3% in quite a few instances. When I’m with someone else, I can just have them pay for me, but when I’m alone, that becomes a bit problematic because I would only ever carry the one credit card and never carry cash.

The second problem I had was that Discover doesn’t have any credit card options that come with “luxury” benefits. The no-annual-fee Discover It card was great, and it had pretty good cash back options, but I wanted a high-end credit card that offered lavish and over-the-top benefits. Discover only had the basic credit cards and nothing that catered to an elite audience.

To address these two problems, I got myself a Visa Infinite Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card back in the middle of 2018. It came with a $450 annual fee, but $300 of that would always come right back to me in the form of a travel credit, and being able to get 4.5% of travel and dining and 1.5% of everything else back in travel redemption meant that I got a lot more value for everyday spending. The card also came with free elite status for car rentals and offered lounge access at airports, along with tons of other perks like extended warranty on purchases and insurance on travel-related incidents.

Since getting the Chase Sapphire Reserve, I ran into literally no problems. Visa is one of the most wildly-accepted credit card brands, and unless I was going to a place that does cash-only transactions (which usually meant I would just leave, because I don’t carry cash and don’t agree to giving business to people who don’t offer the convenience of cashless transactions in today’s age), I never had any payment problems. As you can imagine, having my grocery store stop accepting Visa credit cards was quite a shock after getting so accustomed to it.

So yes, this does mean that I will end up having to drive about an extra mile in each direction to and from the grocery store, because I’ll be shopping somewhere else other than Smith’s. It’s a little disappointing because of the extra time and mileage I’ll have to put in just to do basic grocery shopping, but I guess there isn’t really anything else going wrong in my life right now, so I can’t really complain.

So instead, here is a picture of twilight that I took this morning at around 5:30 AM – a time when my life was simpler because I had not yet discovered my new Visa credit card conundrum.