I hope the genuine rewards cards stay as such. I only have the paypal card by chance, because of refusal to link a bank account to paypal.

I was reading some of the comments about the "rewards" from verizon articles earlier today and there are gobs of comments like "the price for rewards item after the reward is applied is still higher than the cost to get it through amazon!!" And "I work at verizon and we get a commission for signing people up for rewards"

It's pretty clear that most of the non-rewards types of places (verizon hasn't really ever given anything away, they're the most expensive so why would they buck their own trend) are looking for additional sources of revenue.

In another month or two, we'll no longer be a verizon customer, though, so that'll solve that problem.