Valid through 12/21/2013
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| Photo borrowed from TravelWithGrant post |
I’m a bit late reporting this offer, but here goes: OfficeMax is currently running an in-store promotion in which you will save $15 for purchasing $150 worth of American Express gift cards. Unfortunately, the terms explicitly disallow $200 denominations. Best bet: buy three $100 Amex gift cards and the total should ring up with $30 off. Each card has a $5.95 activation fee, so your total should come to $287.85. If I did my math correctly, that’s only a 4 percent discount off the $300 face value, but remember that you can pay with a card that earns bonus points at office supply stores (such as a Chase Ink card) and do pretty well.
You could also, most likely, use these cards to buy Staples $50 e-gift cards to get $10 bonus ePromo cards as I reported earlier today.
TravelWithGrant has more about the OfficeMax deal here.
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@slooz You have to remind them to scan a barcode that they have in order to get the discount.
I went to OfficeMax today and bought 3 x $100 AMEX Cards. No discount showed up. I had to have the manager issue a $30 credit back to my Credit Card.
FM, good job in pointing out that it is 2 offers(discounts) per person and not 2 cards. Last night I went to an OM and the manager only let me buy 2.
I was going to run go do this today, but I don’t see the point. Maybe there’s some advanced technique I’m not getting, but it just doesn’t seem worth it.
First of all, if you follow the link at the bottom of FM’s post to Grant’s post, Grant says you can’t do three. The promotion is limited to a max of 2 per customer. He says you could most likely do more than one purchases, and get 2 per visit. But doing it that way doesn’t increase the 15% discount like FM’s method of buying 3 per visit does.
It just seems anyway you unload the gift card, you’re almost as well off just using a regular gift card.
And with the AMEX gift cards, you have to hassle with finding cashiers who know how to split one purchase up so that you can pay with more than one gift card. That may be easily found, I don’t know, but it sounds like a hassle.
If you use the AMEX gift cards to buy Target AMEX loads, you are still only up $12. The $3 load fee would be charged whether your use your credit card or your AMEX gift cards. And you’d have to find the right cashier to split the payment up…
If you use the AMEX gift cards to buy gift cards with PINs, you have to pay the fees for the gift cards with PINs. Maybe you could get these fees down to $8, if you find the right cashier who knows how to split one payment up between multiple AMEX gift cards… And now you’re only up $12 – $4 (Vanilla Reload fee) = $8 total vs just using your credit card to buy a Vanjilla Reload at CVS
If there were an easy way to unload the AMEX gift cards, I’d probably do this. But when you add the extra step of finding a cashier who knows how to split a payment up between multiple AMEX gift cards…
Do people really bother with stuff like this just to save between $8 and $12?
And like I said above, between $8 and $12 is a high estimate. That estimate assumes you can buy 3 AMEX gift cards in one Staples purchase. But Grant says you can’t do that. You can only buy two at a time…
You can buy 3 gift cards at once and get two $15 discounts on that purchase. The “2” limit is how many discounts you can get, not how many gift cards you can buy. Anyway, I agree that having lots of low denomination gift cards is a hassle. They’re easy to use at big box stores, though, because there the register will automatically drain them to zero if your purchase is bigger than what’s on the card.
Okay, well played FM. You’re $12 discount stands. And with the knowledge that it’s easy to use these at big box stores… It might be worth doing this thing.
Thanks!