Don't leave the planet without it!

The following Chuck Bloom column was published in today's edition (May 3, 2007) of the Collin County Opinion pages of the Dallas Morning News.
My wife, bless her purse-toting heart, owns (and, on occasion, uses) an American Express card. Not too often, but often enough to accumulate a certain amount of redemptive points called Reward Points. Awarded on a dollar spent-for-point basis, cardholders are permitted to redeem said points for gift certificates, merchandise or other special promotions offered to those distinguished members of the AMEX family.
And at the start of each year, cardholders are reminded kindly of such opportunities via a catalog outlining the number of Reward Points needed to exchange for gift certificates at various national and international restaurants (a few of which even exist in Collin County, such as Roy's), airline travel (on every international brand you can name), or other nice perks (shopping certificates, race car lessons not garnered on U.S. Highway 75 at noon). The card makes you feel right at home with Tiger Woods or Ellen DeGeneres – two of the company's celebrity endorserers (a made-up word that rhymes with sorcerers).
This catalog is almost like the annual Christmas book from Dallas' own Neiman Marcus, with some really exotic things offered, but not seriously considered, by 99.99 percent of the people in the land. You might want to buy his and her personalized crystal Potato Heads (by Swarovski) for $15,000. But, get serious; it's not the same as sticking plastic into an Idaho spud. A sports fantasy package starting at $250,000? That's an hour of Alex Rodriguez' time.
In the AMEX catalog, the most expensive items involve spa visits, including one to a spot at the Lake Austin Spa Resort, which can be yours for five nights, at a mere 800,000 points. Another spa in Arizona (Miraval) is worth 850,000 points, which is an awfully expensive rubdown and the best Bengay money can buy.
But they aren't No. 1. That distinction belongs to the person who wants to take a suborbital flight courtesy of the people at Space Adventures. That is worth (pause, take a breath) ... 20 million points! That's right, you read it correctly. So on a dollar-for-point basis, you will have to spend $20 million for that seat (and you don't even reach outer space). By the way, the subzero gravity flight is just 500,000 points for that weightless feeling that you can get at Six Flags.
So I ask: What can you possibly buy worth $20 million on any kind of American Express card? How much jewelry? How many cars? How much travel? Jeez!
I can't help but flash back to the Richard Pryor movie, "Brewster's Millions," where Pryor must spend $30 million in a matter of weeks and show nothing of value for his efforts, or lose a massive inheritance. If you have that kind of money to put on an American Express card in order to take a suborbital flight, why would you need to charge it?
As a measuring stick, the 2007 Maserati Quattroporte Automatic, a fine-looking piece of motor works that gets a nifty 14 miles per gallon in the city, goes for around $130,000. You'd need to buy 153 of them and there would still be change remaining. You don't have that big of an entourage, my friend.
Or you could buy actor Jeffrey Tambor's home in California. He was Hank in "The Garry Shandling Show" on HBO ("Hey, now!"). It's a nice five-bedroom, 4 ½-bath number at 4,200 square feet, a Cape Cod-style house built in 2003. It's yours for $2.9 million and, to get that AMEX perk, you would need to buy the house more than six times over.
Hey, now!
Wait a second ... Plano businesswoman Anousheh Ansari spent her own $20 million to hitchhike with the Russians for an extended space flight a while back. But this is American Express, not Moscow MasterCard, so I kinda think they insisted on cash. Or a certified check. Or, perhaps, coupons.
Of course, there's that nasty little hangup en route to space flight. Not every business takes American Express. In fact, it is a rather selective number of establishments in that AMEX circle of friends. So when the opposition card commercial used to boast, "it takes (you fill in the "priceless" blank), but it doesn't take American Express," it was merely pointing out one of the facts of shopping life. You might want to buy something, but that green card might not let you across the store's border ... so to speak.
Just to be clear, I returned to the 2006 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog and, lo and behold, guess what? Virgin Galatic (part of Virgin Atlantic Airways on steroids, I guess) offers a seat on a charter flight ... to outer space – for a mere $1.764 million. Who da thunk you could get a bargain like that at Neiman Marcus?
Wonder if they'll take American Express for that?