Amex Business OPEN Savings- Change to T&Cs

I logged into Amex today to check up on an OfficeMax purchase that I made with my Amex Business Platinum card.  As you may know, Amex OPEN offers 10% cashback on all purchases over $250 at OfficeMax.com.  Usually the credits post automatically a few days after the purchase.  Well, in this instance it didn't, so I decided to make sure that T&Cs of the OPEN savings program hadn't changed.

Well, they have.  But not necessarily for the worse.  Here are the new T&Cs for OfficeMax:

Automatically get up to a 10% discount OR up to 4 additional Membership Rewards^® points for each dollar spent on eligible purchases at OfficeMax^®.com

Get rewarded on office supplies, ink and toner, furniture, technology products and more. Use your Business Card from American Express OPEN on eligible purchases at OfficeMax.com and automatically get a 5% discount credited to your American Express statement or get 2 additional Membership Rewards points on every dollar spent of $250 or less and 10% or 4 additional points on every dollar spent more than $250.

So.  More options are usually better, but I'd have a pretty hard time choosing 4 MR points over 10% cashback.  That's valuing the MR points at 2.5CPP, which is about a penny too high in my estimation.  I haven't figured out how to "choose" the cashback yet, but I've sent in a Secure Message to find out.  I'll update this post with the answer.

UPDATE:

I received a response to my SM.  Here's the relevant portion:

"Yes, you are absolutely right! You can get up to 4 additional Membership Rewards points for each dollar spent on eligible purchases at OfficeMax.com.

As of February 22, 2013 OPEN MR enrolled accounts will have the option of selecting their OPEN Savings currency preference of additional Membership Rewards points or discount (statement credit). Cardmembers will be notified of the change in the April 2013 - Changes to the Cardmember Agreement.

Use a Business Card from American Express OPEN on eligible purchases at OfficeMax.com and automatically get the following:

- 2 additional Membership Rewards points on every purchase of $250.00 or less 
- 4 additional points on every purchase more than $250.00

However, I assure you that you will continue to receive statement credits (up to 10%) unless you switch to the Membership Rewards option. 

It looks like Amex is changing things up a bit with cashback remaining the default.  Bonus MR points are bound to be better for their bottom line than cash discounts, so we'll see how long that lasts.  At least the discounts aren't going away just yet.  Losing them would be a serious blow to the Amex business program.