You can double dip by separating two applications by eight days with one business AA card and one personal, just don’t hit the spend target on either card until you have both cards in hand. UPDATE: Corrected double dip language
There’s are two generic, targeted no lifetime language (NLL) American Express no-annual fee card offers:
These cards usually have offers for additional points or statement credits for adding employee cards and spending on those cards too. (Thanks to EarthlingMardiDraw)
EDITOR’S NOTE: No, it wasn’t anything to do with daylight savings time, it was the AM/PM thing with yesterday’s post. You can find it here if you never saw it once fixed. Actually, you can find it there whether or not you saw it once fixed.
– Personal: 35,000 points with $3,000 spend in three months plus 2x points on unbounded spend for six months, up to $15,000 spend – Business: 60,000 points after $5,000 spend in three months, and a Category 1-4 free night certificate after $15,000 spend in six months
Both of these have some utility, but the business one is a clear winner if you can make use of a Category 1-4. I can always make use of them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not annoying.
Prices were supposed to revert to normal yesterday, but some European and Asian properties have redemptions with half the regular points needed, so I guess we discovered the mythical loyalty program de-devaluation and ended up better than we were before. This is probably an accident to though, which (accidentally) seems to be Choice’s 2025 modus operandi.
Giant Food, Stop & Shop, and Giant/Martins stores have 2x points on Vanilla Visa gift cards through Thursday, limit $1,500 – $2,000 per account depending on the chain. (Thanks to RabbMD)
Wells Fargo has a $2,500 bonus for opening or upgrading to a Premier Checking account and bringing $250,000 in new assets within 45 days through February 25. Investment accounts and IRAs count, so you can ACATS transfer funds from another brokerage into a Wells Fargo investment account without a taxable event.
Coincidentally, $250,000 in linked accounts is what you need to avoid monthly service fees too. (Thanks to DoC)
Have a nice weekend, and watch for tomorrow’s guest post!
Even Choice Hotel plumbers accidentally did their work.
– $250 off of $1,800+ with Virgin Atlantic through March 30 – $100 off of $500+ with Marriott through March 31 – $250 off of $1,000+ with Marriott Homes & Villas through April 13
Gamers gonna game, but family Virgin Atlantic Business redemptions gonna tax.
– 1x at Food Lion through February 28 for a single purchase, the cap is variable – 1x at Staples through January 31 for two purchases, the cap is variable
SimplyMiles works with any Mastercard, not just AA cards.
Each has economy tickets at 15,000 miles each way between the US and Europe, and I was able to find a few 50,000 mile Business class redemptions between those cities and secondary European cities, but the availability is about as rare as recovering stolen meat in Cupertino, CA.
Pictured without further comment: Police recover stolen meat.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I still have several guest posts from the holiday break that will go live on Fridays or Saturdays in the coming weeks. If you’d like to contribute a guest post, please reach out!
Also if you wrote to me over the holiday and I haven’t responded, it’s not you, it’s me. I’m still catching up.
– Gold status for 5,000 Hyatt points – Platinum status for 8,000 Hyatt points – Platinum Pro status for 12,000 Hyatt points
The best use cases are probably for checked bag benefits, main cabin extra seating for the account holder and maybe companions, and for international lounge access on economy tickets. You’ll earn bonus miles and you’ll end up on the upgrade list too, but your changes of an upgrade clearing are approximately the same as your chances of being involved in a plane-crash while you’re on a sail-boat moored in a bunker. (Thanks to blinyellow)
The authorized user card will show up on the user’s credit report, which is great if you’re trying to build credit for a minor, but less great for everyone else. (Thanks to DDG)
AA bag tag for when your status for a day is in transit.
Happy New Year, and thanks to everyone who put together a guest post over the break! I still several posts left that’ll go live on Fridays or Saturdays starting next week. If you’d like to put a post together, please reach out! Also, if you reached out to me over the break and never heard back, I promise I wasn’t just ignoring you – I was ignoring everyone. I’ll be playing catchup this week.
The Citi Shop Your Way card sent offers for calendar year 2025 that mirror those sent at the beginning of 2024. The credits are for spend in gas, grocery, or restaurants and reset monthly. We’ve seen:
– $200 per month for $2,000+ spend – $150 per month for $1,500+ spend – $100 per month for $1,000+ spend
For those who can’t math, that’s $1,200-$2,400 annually in statement credits on a no-annual fee card, and those will stack other offers too. It’s pretty big I guess. Also, apparently there’s another offer for travel and entertainment purchases monthly through 2025, with 5% back up to $80 monthly. Some have both offers. (Thanks to birt and tkpoints)
MEABNOTE: I’ll be going on a blogging vacation at the end of the year and there won’t be any daily posts between December 18 and December 31. After that, we’ll ring in the new year on January 1, 2025 with the 2024 version of Travel Hacking as Told by GIFs though, so no need to be up in arms, but I guess it’s ok if you’re up in legs.
By popular demand we’ll have at least a few guest posts during the break. If you’d like to write one, please reach out, I’d like to find guest posts for the whole break!
Introduction
We’ve talked several times about the Pepper Rewards gift card selling platform, which seems to have been explicitly designed to transfer money from Venture Capitalist bank accounts to our wallets at lighting speed. In the most recent MEAB post on the subject, I included a toy model based prediction that there’s a 50/50 chance that the company fails by the end of 2024. I’m now updating the timeline for the 50/50 failure scenario to be March 23, we’ll see why later.
Recent Changes
First, let’s discuss how Pepper has changed in the last month:
Bonus offers are now targeted to specific accounts
Many of the best offers are now limited to one per account per day
New accounts get low bonus offers until they spend five-ish figures
Account limits are either $5,500, $7,000, or $10,500 spend per rolling 24 hours
Most of the rebates are now floated for 14 days
Pepper has effectively stopped responding to most support requests
Pepper is moving merchant accounts from Stripe to PayArc
The first two bullets seem to be Pepper’s attempt at preventing a few whales from taking all of the best deals’ capacity through botting. The third and fourth bullets seem to attempt to separate gift card resellers from regular users and to separate resellers into tiers. The last two bullets are almost certainly about saving money and lowering reserve capital requirements.
Recent Deals
As degenerate churners are well aware, Pepper has pushed the resale market for high value gift cards down to decades-long lows by offering almost daily:
17-20% discounts on Kohls gift cards
12-16% discounts on Amazon gift cards
12-16% discounts on Walmart and Sam’s Club gift cards
15-18% discounts on Nike gift cards
Let’s get something out of the way about these deals: There’s no world in which Amazon or Walmart are giving gift card sellers a discount in the double digit percentages on millions of dollars of inventory. There’s also no world in which Pepper isn’t paying merchant processing fees of at minimum 2.7%, but more realistically 3%+ on each of these transactions too. Pepper is losing on each of these bulk gift card transactions, period.
Pepper’s Vision
Pepper has started a new funding round a month or two later than I expected based on the toy model, but still within the general time frame. Fortunately for us, their pitch deck and story is on YouTube so it’s easy to see what they’re telling investors. My favorite bits from the video:
“Pepper earns a 6% commission on every transaction”
Pepper somehow will know your favorite color and shoe size with AI, and this isn’t MEAB snark
Their Chief Revenue Officer was a DoorDash sales executive
Pepper believes that their total addressable market is $6 trillion (almost 23% of the US GDP, seems legit)
There’s definitely a fair amount of slippery language in the video, but I want to call out the most slippery statement, that “Pepper earns a 6% commission on every transaction”. Look, I actually believe they earn an average of 6% commission on every transaction, but the slippery language is undoubtedly that their 6% is a gross commission on the face value of gift cards, not a profit margin. (I think Pepper is lucky if their current profit margin is -6%; it’s definitely not +6%.)
Side note: I think that 6% number is realistically the discount that they earn on face value for the aggregate of all the gift cards that they sell, making it a really interesting number for any future models.
The Pepper Future
Alright, we’ve buried the lede. Based on my toy model I expected a 50/50 failure by the end of 2024, but I’ve revised that to 50/50 by March 20. Why that date? It’s silly, but there’s a metric that’s more accurate than any toy model in my mind: Almost all high-growth, high-spend VC backed companies start raising their next round of funding 3-4 months before they run out of the cash from their last round; it’s almost universal for companies like this.
Given the above and that Pepper posted their investor presentation on December 8, three months is March 8, and four months is April 8, the expectation value for running out of money is March 23. If they haven’t run out of money by then, it’s probably for one or both of two reasons:
They’ve raised more cash successfully
They’ve restructured their expenses, including employee and boost costs
I’m sure Youtube is the way to most investors hearts though, right?
My Action
I still use Pepper, and I have pending rebates well into the thousands of dollars floated with them too. My goal is to scale that back gradually as March approaches to limit my exposure in case of a Pepper failure. If this was a public company, you can be completely sure I’d be buying out of the money puts. I also expect that I’ll end up losing some money when they eventually fail, but I can more-or-less control how much and take profits in the mean time.
MEABNOTE: I’ll be going on a blogging vacation at the end of the year and there won’t be any daily posts between December 18 and December 31. After that, we’ll ring in the new year on January 1, 2025 with the 2024 version of Travel Hacking as Told by GIFs though, so no need to be up in arms, but I guess it’s ok if you’re up in legs.
By popular demand we’ll have at least a few guest posts during the break. If you’d like to write one, please reach out, I’d like to find guest posts for the whole break!
Do this now: Register for 5x categories on quarterly cards:
– Chase Freedom and Freedom Flex: Grocery, fitness, gyms, hair, nails, spas, and Norwegian Cruises (welcome to the world of sponsored 5x categories friends) – Discover IT: Restaurants, home improvement, and some streaming – Citi Dividend: Amazon and some streaming – US Bank Cash+: I choose utilities and electronics stores
I try and knock these out on the first day or two of the quarter so I don’t have to think about them after.
– 250,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points with $1,000+ – 200,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points with $750+ – $70 statement credit with $1,000+ – $50 statement credit with $750+
As usual, these stack with other offers. (Thanks to birt, Adam, Lindsay, and Tyler)
Giftcards.com has 10% off of its own gift cards through December21. These cards can be used to buy other, third-party fee-free gift cards on the site with promo code EPICGIFT. These probably won’t track on shopping portals when you buy them, but when you use them on another purchase that’ll probably track. There are several credit cards that earn 3x on giftcards.com.
– Will this work with HiltonGiftCards.com? Yes – Will this work buying gift cards at a hotel? Yes – Will this work at Hilton restaurant? Usually, watch for a 15% extra hold for tip – Will this work for a regular hotel to pay your bill? Yes, depending on the front desk’s skillset – Who is John Galt? I dunno; or if I do, I don’t want to talk about it here, why do you ask?
Also, orange-you glad I didn’t say banana? (That’s called a “long con” friends, at least on internet time scales.)
MEABNOTE: I’ll be going on a blogging vacation at the end of the year and there won’t be any daily posts between December 18 and December 31. After that, we’ll ring in the new year on January 1, 2025 with the 2024 version of Travel Hacking as Told by GIFs though, so no need to be up in arms, but I guess it’s ok if you’re up in legs.
By popular demand, we’ll have at least a couple of guest posts during the break. If you’d like to write one, please reach out!
