This is a curious little rebate.
It's almost worthless because the amount one spends in the cafe car is so small. Maybe if they actually offered full-service dining car service on the East Coast to coach passengers, I'd be able to use this rebate for more than pennies.
I'd actually argue that it isn't worthless in two main situations:
(1) Frequent Regional travelers/"Amtrak commuters". It knocks the edge off the price of a cup of coffee, in particular, if you're not in Business Class (on the Regional).
(2) LD travel. Again, it takes the edge off the cost of F&B on an LD trip, and it makes a dent in the cost of buying a drink with dinner.
More to the point, I've maneuvered my tips onto the card for several years (usually by buying a drink with dinner), so I'm basically being rebated on my tips.
My guess is that (1) is the main market. It's not likely to single-handedly offset the cost of the card, but I can see a situation where it makes a substantial dent in it (you've only got to spend $100/yr to get $20 back off of it). TBH, if they hadn't axed the diner on the
Meteor it probably
would cover the cost of the card for me (consider that I was generally having dinner on the
Meteor at least once a month for most of the last decade, and figure a tip in the $10-15 range (depending on how the rounding worked, and bearing in mind that on some trips I'd be using a tip at one meal to cover 2-3 meals' tips), and then throw in some miscellaneous spend on Regionals (or on other LD trips) and it had a good chance of tallying up closer to the $395 needed in on-board spend to offset the card.
Edit: Also note that this was/is slick accounting magic: The revenue is still likely being credited to the train in question, but the rebate is very likely going to come from the credit card side of things. It's a wonderful trick to try and move more cash into the OBS account. It is also in line with what Delta offers on their CCs (though to be fair, said offer is mostly irrelevant from my POV because of my travel patterns).