Mr. Carr, Mr. Scholnick, Mr. Lee and Mr. Ware, good morning and welcome.
I will begin with you, Mr. Carr, because earlier, you tried to dodge the question about loyalty programs. You said that you are an economist, and do not deal with matters like that.
I also want to thank you for stating from the outset, in a very transparent manner, that your work was sponsored by Visa.
I do not think that you can easily evade the issue of loyalty programs. Take, for example, a television ad that is now running, in which two women are leaving a supermarket, both pushing a shopping cart full of groceries, and one turns to the other and says that she paid with her Visa card from a certain bank, and received a $2 cashback on a $100-purchase. The other woman tilts her head and says that it's rather trivial. The first woman asks her how much she got back, and the second one says nothing because she paid with cash.
Therefore, it leads one to ask: Who else paid for the $2 cashback to the first woman, if it is not all consumers, including the ones who use cash to pay for increasingly expensive grocery items? Who paid for the $2 the woman got back because she used her Visa card?