Take on the expiration date

It used to be that the biggest pain in losing your wallet was finding the phone number to cancel your credit cards which they post on the one thing you don't have anymore... the back of the lost card.. But now with smartphones finding a phone number isn't the difficult thing anymore but now there is another difficulty. See if you lose your card there is a good reason to get a new one, if it expires they send you the same card with a date punted three years into the future.
A few weeks ago my credit card expired so it wasn't even the mad-scramble of a lost card. Bank of America sent a replacement in the mail and except for one would-be-transaction I never missed a beat.. The issue only showed up two weeks later when I started getting notices that my gym membership wasn't paid and now overdue. See like many Americans I have direct payment set up for tons of things from my cable-bill to my cell phone-bill as well as being set up with an easy click through on Amazon, PayPall, Woot, ProFlowers and a Overstock.
So because my card expired I had to individually contact 10 different merchants to chang the date on my card from 3/11 to 3/14 which was a total nightmare.
Why the hell are there expiration dates on a card anyway? It's not milk where the funds go bad after a few years. We are a decade removed from those card machines using that big metal sliding thing and every store has a machine which dials directly into the bank for authorization. There are three and four digit codes to confirm the card is in your possession and some merchants even ask you to supply a zipcode but nowhere does an expiration date really come into play.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry