There was a Monday post here, but it was removed after several asks from interested parties (the concern was about repercussions from a dead deal). We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.
Category: Status
Foreward: I apologize in advance for what’s coming. It kind of just happened in the first paragraph and then, well, you’ll see shortly.
1. Delta Platinum and Diamond medallions should make sure they’ve selected their Choice Benefits for the 2021 medallion year by the end of the day. (Confusingly, 2021 medallion year Choice Benefits are for status earned in 2020.) Tonight at midnight these choices turn into a pumpkin.
2. Check the dashboard of your American Express Green and Gold personal cards for an upgrade offer of 75,000 Membership Rewards after spending $6,000 in six months and +5x points for up to $15,000 in spend at supermarkets, gas stations, and restaurants. In case you do math like a pumpkin, that means 1x+5x, or 6x. (Thanks to bewhoaleavemealone)
3. Kroger.com has $10 off of $150 in Visa and Mastercard gift cards using code JAN2022 now through Wednesday. Unlike the physical US Bank cards that Kroger sells in store, these are Metabanks and are processed by Blackhawk Network, so liquidation is a bit tougher; you may have to resort to buying pumpkins for resale.
4. Kroger stores are running a 4x fuel points sale on gift cards starting Wednesday and running through February 8. Bulk gift card resale markets still look like a rotting pumpkin though, so while normally a 4x fuel points sale like this would depress the market value of Kroger fuel points, I don’t expect that to happen this time.
What started out as a slow weekend turned into a landslide:
1. In September there was a backdoor way to turn an American Express Clear credit into $100 in United TravelBank credit through a promotion for a new Clear account. The offer is now back, and it’s still a way to turn a Clear statement credit into a quick TravelBank hundo. The caveats:
- The $100 TravelBank credit expires after six months
- You have to fly United or United Express to pay for airfare with TravelBank funds
- TravelBank funds can’t be used to pay for therapy or liquor, even on a United flight
Last time you didn’t actually need to complete enrollment at an airport for the $100 credit to show up in your account, likely it’ll be no different this time.
2. Check your Chase Offers for 10% or 15% back up to $37 for charges at a Hyatt property from now through Valentine’s day.
3. The demise of the Citi Premier 80,000 points bonus has been greatly overstated. You can still find it at this link, and don’t forget that you can get this bonus multiple times as long as you space your applications out by more than 8 days and you hit the bonus spending threshold after all of your applications are in.
4. Since around Christmas time reports have surfaced that the American Express Blue Business Plus card has been eligible for the 1.9 Million Membership Rewards offer for adding employee cards (20,000 points per employee card that meets the minimum threshold spend, up to 99 employees). To see if you’re eligible, you’ll have to call American Express and ask if there are any offers for adding employees to your card.
The Blue Business Plus variant of this offer is better than the Business Platinum variant though, because the threshold for earning 20,000 bonus Membership Rewards is $2,000 in spend versus the $4,000 spend requirement on the Business Platinum. If you maximize this deal it becomes a 12x everywhere offer for up to $50,000 in spend and 11x everywhere for the remaining $49,000 in spend, wowza.
5. The Free-quent Flyer has an excellent post on how to match your Hyatt status to MGM Resorts MLife gold status, and the instructions clock in at seven words. I admire the brevity.
I heard from quite a few of you this week and I appreciated your insightful questions and discussion. Thanks to all of you.
Now let’s sail into the weekend with a few items:
1. We’re far enough into 2021 to have good data-points on what’s working with American Express airline incidental credits and you can expect a writeup on that next week, but after a few positive reports we’ve gotten new reports yesterday that United TravelBank errors when you manually enter your credit card information.
It might seem like that avenue stopped working, but it didn’t. You can still purchase those United “incidentals” as long as you pay with a credit card that was saved to your MileagePlus profile.
2. You can get Star Alliance Gold status through February of 2024 by combining a promotion that started in April of last year with Singapore’s newly announced “loyalty measures”, and no, I didn’t make that term up. To do so, you’ll need to transfer 250,000 Chase, Capital One, Citi, or American Express points to Singapore (watch out for expiration of those miles after three years though).
This is very useful if you fly United domestically regularly because it gives you access to United Clubs while you have a same-day United flight, so you can drink yourself numb on cheap whiskey to reduce the pain of travel on your upcoming ERJ-145 or CRJ-200 United flight.
3. We had a nice three weeks without thinking about those pesky $200 MetaBank gift cards, right? Well, party’s over man. Staples is having a fee-free sale starting on Sunday running through the following Saturday for $200 Visa gift cards, limit five per transaction. To maximize:
- Use a card that bonuses at office supply stores (duh)
- Try for multiple transactions back-to-back, five per transaction
Unfortunately the Rakuten in-store card linked program for cash back at Staples is no longer around.
4. Related to the above? Maybe a little. The final payment date for Q4 2021 estimated taxes is Tuesday, and there are three major payment processors that accept debit cards. The IRS limit is technically two payments per quarter, but in practice they accept two payments per processor for each quarter at a cost somewhere around $2.50 each for using a Metabank debit card (EDIT: Thanks to Gary at VFTW for the correction on IRS limits):
Overpaying the IRS and getting it back as a refund was a nice manufactured spend technique in the before times, but now due to staffing shortages and tax code changes realize that refunds are now taking six months or more (though you do earn a 3.2% interest rate from the IRS while waiting for your refund).
Happy weekend!
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.
1. American Express’s 10 charge card limit and 5 credit card limit both seem to have changed. Justin O shared that he was approved for a 6th charge card late Tuesday night, and after his data-point many others followed confirming that the limits aren’t currently being enforced or have changed. I lobbed in an application for the Blue Business Plus credit card using a referral link from P2’s account and was instantly approved which puts me at 11 charge cards and 6 credit cards.
Maybe American Express was trying to copy Chase’s loosening of its 5/24 rules? Either way I’m happy.
2. PenFed is sending holiday spending bonus offers via email. My offer was for $50 back on $500 spend on my PenFed card. Other offers include $15 back on three contactless purchases, a $15 streaming credit, and $20 back on $20 or more in wireless spend.
3. Hertz is letting current President’s Circle members gift President’s Circle status to anyone else before December 15, with the status valid through June 30, 2022. You can gift status at this link.
4. American Express has new transfer bonuses for December:
- 30% to Virgin Atlantic FlyingClub
- Use for ANA round-trip business class (90,000 miles) or first class (110,000 miles) awards to Japan
- Use for Delta one-way Business class non-stop awards to or from Europe (50,000 – 65,000 miles)
- 20% to Singapore KrisFlyer
- Use for economy Alaska flights to or from Hawaii (12,000 – 17,500 miles)
- Use for business class Star Alliance flights to the middle east (76,500 miles)
5. Vinh has some great advice and it’s worth repeating his conclusion: “The lesson learned is if you see a new VGC on the rack, go test it out.”
Happy Thursday!
Introduction
On Monday of last week I was bright-eyed for a blow-out Black Friday weekend for manufactured spend, and unfortunately that was a bit of misplaced optimism on my part. Big box retailers faced with supply chain issues didn’t want to discount things that are going to take months to restock and thus didn’t have a major incentive to discount hot items.
Are you ready for Miles Earn and Burn “Economics 1010”? I’m not sure I’m ready to deliver it, but here we go anyway — let’s discuss this weekend’s macro economic picture to start us off, and then we’ll look at the effects on our game.
Macro
The major causes for this year’s lackluster MS opportunities seem to be:
- BestBuy deals that didn’t bring out crowds
- Walmart deals that didn’t bring out crowds (and it lost a significant proportion of purchases to Amazon this year)
- The ongoing chip shortage, which means popular electronics weren’t immediately available to be purchased for resale (incidentally, the shortage was a major factor for the overall decline in the weekend’s revenue)
- Kroger’s profits — Kroger will give guidance on their Q4 profitability during their earnings call tomorrow morning. They had record profits during the pandemic lockdown and are likely going to have a hard time meeting that performance with most of the US economy reopened, so they’re going to look at cutting costs to keep profit as close to the pandemic level as possible
Impact on Us
Ok, so what happened that’s directly related to us?
- BestBuy gift cards
- Bulk BestBuy gift card buyers stocked up on their gift card reserves in the week leading up to the sale in anticipation of the weekend’s deals
- BestBuy effectively blocked buying bots for their few hot items from Thursday – Monday (but then seems to have ceased those measures yesterday); this meant it was much harder to spend existing gift card supply
- The bulk gift card resale market became saturated, so much so that one aggregator reportedly had a backlog of $7M in gift cards over the weekend
- Spot rates for $500 BestBuy gift cards dropped to 96% or lower, and most regular gift card buyers stopped buying
- Other bulk gift cards
- The BestBuy gift card debacle pushed serial MSers into Apple, Marshalls, Nike, and Home Depot gift cards
- Buyer capacity for Apple, Marshalls, Nike, and Home Depot dried up with a new glut of supply normally spent on BestBuy
- Non-bulk gift cards
- Second tier gift cards (Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, Gap, etc) had great deal flow with many above-cost opportunities
- Third tier gift cards (Subway, Red Robin, Dominos, etc) had great deal flow too with many at-cost deals
- Buyer’s groups
- The deal flow across second tier retailers was lower than a typical Black Friday weekend, though higher than a typical week
- Big-ticket item deals (> $400 or so) were more scarce than years past
- Resale groups
- Many hot items were unavailable for purchase due to supply issues
- Big-ticket item deals (> $400 or so) were more scarce over the weekend than even a typical week in 2021
- Kroger rewards
- Kroger’s 4x promotion hit a road-block on Sunday continuing into late Monday: 4x rewards weren’t posting
(incidentally, I believe that this happened because Kroger is trying to fix a loophole in its rewards program to improve profitability, and it seemed to work only to a small extent)
- Without grocery rewards at a boosted, bulk gift card purchases at Kroger ground to a screeching halt
- Kroger’s 4x promotion hit a road-block on Sunday continuing into late Monday: 4x rewards weren’t posting
- Travel sales
- There weren’t any major sales from the US carriers beyond what comes every month or two throughout the year. Frankly, it’s a sad state of affairs when the best deal was $50 off of a one-way flight with JetBlue
- Marriott had 25% off of certain hotel points redemptions, but the list of asterisks associated with that deal was longer than the number of hotels participating (or at least close)
In summary, the weekend was the lamest Black Friday weekend in recent memory.
How I Fared
I still had a great weekend despite everything — that’s because opportunities that I’ve developed over the year continue to work, and even though the weekend wasn’t as great as past iterations there were still plenty of deals to keep me busy. In the end, I hit approximately $60,000 in manufactured spend over the course of about seven hours of focus scattered over a few days, with the rest of the time being spent with my loved ones. I consider that to be a huge success.
I hope you hit your MS goals, or at least struck a nice-balance between MS and time with those you care about. Happy MSing going into the holiday season! There’s still plenty of opportunity.
1. Hertz is extending elite status through June 2022, but only if you opt-in via a link they sent via email. In case you can’t find that message or it never made it, you can make your own opt-in link by replacing XXXXXXXX with your Hertz loyalty number and pasting it into a web-browser:
https://pub.emails.hertz.com/TierExtension?&MemberNumber=XXXXXXXX
(Note for the tech-geeks out there: Yes, this URL’s query string doesn’t make sense, but that’s how Hertz sent it and it does work. Hertz generally has the dubious distinction of “Worse IT than Citi”, so at least it’s on-brand.)
2. Serve cards can again be loaded with debit cards fee-free at Family Dollar and Dollar General. I don’t really get involved with this one because there’s a limit of $500 per store per day and I’m nowhere near any of them. But it is a decent way to unload BlackHawk gift cards in a fee-free manner. Bonus: You can also pick-up some candy hearts from Valentine’s 2021 in case you’ve been missing them.
3. Most of the people that I chat with assume that the Rakuten’s only use is as shopping portal rebate, and while that’s partially true, there’s another play that’s been largely under the radar for several years: Rakuten’s in-store card linked program. Over the past several years there have been a handful of useful plays, but most of them dried up in early 2021.
Fast forward to late 2021 though and it looks like we might be returning to the good times, as Rakuten has added Staples as a partner for in-store purchases at 2.5%. It’s probably worth spending five minutes to link all of your Chase Ink cards to your Rakuten wallet. (Thanks to jerseyguy195 on reddit)
Update: Reader Tom wrote in to offer a warning that you could be shutdown as he was a few years ago if you push too much gift card volume through. YMMV.
4. Simon has 55% off of purchase fees for bulk Visa and Mastercard bulk gift card purchases using code NOV21JOY55. I guess for some of you it’ll pair well with item 2. Remember that American Express cards don’t earn points and purchases don’t count toward minimum spend at Simon.
Happy Tuesday!
