Free money from Radio Shack

33

RadioShack has an amazing promotion going on now through February 28th.  Trade in 5 portable electronics for a gift card worth at least $25.  You can trade in almost anything: old headphones, video games, digital cameras, etc. 

RadioShackTradeIn

My experience

I traded in four old headphones and a bulky old USB wall charger.  The cashier didn’t actually test any of the stuff to see if it worked.  She asked for my driver’s license and then proceeded to type into the computer for the next 20 minutes or so before finally giving me the $25 gift card.  I then immediately used the $25 gift card to buy a $25 Amazon Kindle gift card.  As you probably know, Kindle gift cards can be used to buy anything at Amazon.com, not just Kindle books and accessories. 

Exceeding limits?

There is a strict limit of 5 trade-ins per customer, for a total of $25 back (unless your trade-ins are worth more than $5 each).  I assume that they enforce this by recording your driver’s license number.  One contributor to this SlickDeals thread said that he was able to use his passport one time and his driver’s license another in order to get a total of $50 worth of gift cards.  In my case, I offered up my passport as ID, but was told that they really needed a driver’s license.  I might try later to see if a different RadioShack will accept my passport.  In the meantime, I’ll drag my wife out to RadioShack when I get a chance so that we can get another $25 gift card by using her license.

Don’t forget to ask for your driver’s license back before leaving the store!  I came very close to leaving mine behind.

Finding electronics

My assumption is that most people have drawers full of old unused stuff that would qualify for this promotion.  If not, I’d recommend making your way to a thrift store or dollar store to pickup trade-ins dirt cheap.

How to use the $25 gift card

If you want to buy RadioShack merchandise, you can earn some extra cash or bonus points & miles by shopping through an online portal.  Go to this CashBackMonitor page to find the best option for your needs.  If you don’t want anything from RadioShack, you have a couple of options:

Sell gift card:  GiftCardGranny shows that you can get up to 76% of the RadioShack gift card’s value by selling to an online gift card reseller.  76% of $25 is $19.

Upgrade gift card: At my local RadioShack, the following gift cards were available: iTunes, Facebook, Google Play, Amazon Kindle, and Barnes & Noble Nook (that’s the one on the bottom, right in the photo below):

RadioShackGiftCards

Don’t forget about OfficeMax!

For the rest of this week, OfficeMax is still offering $20 off of $300 worth of MasterCard gift cards.  As I explained in this Quick Deals post, the best option is to buy three $200 cards at once so as to get $40 off.  After accounting for fees, the total cost for $600 in gift cards should come to $580.85.  If you don’t see the cards on display, ask an employee to check for more.  Sometimes extras are squirreled away inside the gift card cabinet, in the manager’s office, or somewhere “in the back”. 

Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

33 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments