This is absolutely the slowest time of the year for gift card reselling, and 2022 has started out even slower than normal. Kroger is doing its best to change that with a Friday through Sunday 4x fuel points sale, but even that isn’t going to revive the market with meaningful volume given the backlog that aggregators currently have. Here’s what I’m seeing out there, and it’s a bleak January:
Tier 1 Cards
Resale rates (without fuel points) are weak and capacity to buy is currently small:
- BestBuy: 95.5%
- Home Depot: 93.5%
- Apple: 93.5%
- Nike: 93%
- Lowe’s: 91%
If you’re really good at fuel points and can use them for yourself, they’re worth $35 per 1,000 which will easily make up for any loss you have when reselling Tier 1 cards. If you’re less good at them, their value is closer to the $15-18 range which can still make these deals worthwhile, provided you find a gift card buyer with capacity of course.
Tier 2 Cards
Tier 2 cards cards like Adidas, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Gap just aren’t moving right now but I expect that to change by the end of the month. That said, even when these cards start moving it typically only make sense to buy when there a good deal on them, and those deals are likely to be non-existent other than perhaps for MLK weekend, so don’t get your hopes up for any volume.
Tier 3 Cards
Lower tier cards like Domino’s and Bath and Body Works are also at a stand-still, but unlike the tier above, I don’t really expect them to start moving until February and I’m not expecting any major deals on them until then either. So if you got some of these over the holidays, it may be best to order what Domino’s calls a “pizza”, but the rest of the world calls “cheap cheese, red paste, and grease bread”.
How MEAB is Playing It
I’ll be using Kroger’s 4x fuel points sale to offset the loss in selling Tier 1 cards this weekend, but it’s not going to be any sizable volume. Instead I’m focusing on non-gift card reselling techniques to keep the my spend up, and I suggest you do the same.
Good luck out there!
Special thanks to Travel With a Point for noting a grammar error in the original version of this post.
