Why will there always be another deal?

I like to say that “every deal dies, but there will always be another deal.”

I think most travel hackers of ordinary intelligence understand why every deal dies. If you think of each deal as being designed with some average cost per user in mind, then the two inputs are the expected total cost and the expected total number of users taking advantage of it. If and when a company realizes those expectations were wrong, they look for ways to bring it back into balance, either by reducing the cost per user (devaluations and fee increases) or reducing the number of users (shutdowns and per-user limits).

Obviously this can take a long, long time, either because of incompetent program management, government regulations, or simply low uptake. Even a program that’s hemorrhaging money on a per-user basis can last for a long time if so few people know about it that it takes the company months or years to notice. If a promotion was the brainchild of an ambitious middle manager, they may even realize it’s over-budget but delay admitting they were wrong as long as possible — time that belongs to us.

That crude model (deals die faster the sooner and more expensive they end up being) doesn’t explain the other side of my formula: there will always be another deal. If every deal dies, then one thing you might expect is that the people who kill them will learn from experience and get better and better at developing deals that are more profitable for their companies than they are for us. The people who pitched unprofitable deals will get fired or reassigned (or promoted) to a role where they can do less damage.

But that hasn’t happened. I’m hardly an “old-timer” compared to some folks in the community, but in the 15 years I’ve made it my hobby, for every deal that has died (that I know about — an important caveat in a tight-lipped community) another deal has come up. Sometimes the new deal is less profitable and sometimes it’s more profitable, but it’s always there.

Some people don’t notice this because for a casual travel hacker, especially people who “just have one deal,” the end of their first deal is the end of their travel hacking career. For a lot of people who started around the time I did, that deal was easily-purchased and -liquidated Vanilla Reload cards at bonused merchants like office supply stores and drug stores. For others it was when money orders became too onerous to purchase at Walmart with prepaid debit cards.

I have a family member who earned the Southwest Companion Pass for 3 or 4 years using signup bonuses and manufactured spend. He saved tens of thousands of dollars on Southwest flights, and when he lost access to those deals he said “that’s it for me” and walked away. And good for him!

“When the fun stops,” as the Vegas casino industry slogan says.

It is extremely profitable to borrow, lend, and use money

Travel hacking is a middle-man business. What drives the creation of new deals in the American market is that the “middle” is enormously profitable, so there are plenty of slices of it to cut off.

A popular article circulated back in 2024 laying out one part of that process, specifically about credit card rewards. I don’t know the author and can’t vouch for the specific numbers he uses, but the general idea is obviously correct:

“The heaviest credit card spenders…are wealthy and sophisticated. They use credit cards primarily as payment instruments. Issuers compete aggressively for their business, which is quite lucrative. This is not because they pay much in interest, because while they have higher headline APRs they only rarely revolve balances. It is because ‘clipping the ticket’ via interchange on a high volume of transactions is an excellent business to be in.”

It’s a cliche that "every business has to accept credit cards now,” but that isn’t true. There’s a beloved grocery store in Wisconsin that only accepts debit cards and, for whatever reason, Discover credit cards.

What people really mean is that most businesses choose to accept credit cards in order to stay in business, that is to say, in order to turn a profit, ideally as large a profit as possible. A business that didn’t accept credit cards would have fewer customers, but that would be an obvious tradeoff to make if businesses were consistently losing money on credit card transactions.

The reason businesses accept the interchange fees they’re constantly complaining about is that businesses are very profitable. Credit card processors take a piece of that profit, credit card companies take another, and there is still enough left over for us to take yet another piece of it in the form of third-party and in-store rewards.

As long as business is profitable, there will always be excess inventory

It’s an old cliche that a plane ticket is a product that becomes more and more valuable over time (since last-minute bookers are more and more desperate as seats get scarcer and scarcer) until it expires worthless (when the plane takes off with unsold seats). But while airline tickets, rental cars, and hotel rooms are convenient illustrations, the same process applies to virtually all retail inventory.

The most expensive day to buy new clothes is at the beginning of the season, because that’s when clothing companies know the clothes are most valuable to you. The cheapest day to buy new clothes is during end-of-season sales when stores are trying to unload spoiling merchandise from the previous season.

It’s true in technology, too: Apple charges the most for new smartphones and computers on the day they’re released, and eventually starts giving them away to clear their shelves before the next generation of hardware is released. A two-generation-old iPhone is as worthless a use of shelf space as a two-week-old banana or a flight that departed two weeks ago.

All inventory is constantly spoiling, and all companies are desperate to get rid of it the second it hits their shelves.

What would really stop new deals from arising?

In one sense, these laws are relatively constant under capitalist conditions. Grocery stores in Europe have loyalty programs because their bananas spoil just as quickly as ours do and they too need to get them off the shelves before they expire worthless. That’s what those weekly grocery advertising inserts have always been for. Grocery stores give away turkeys around Thanksgiving because they don’t want to be left with frozen turkeys the day after Thanksgiving, when Americans stop eating them.

Airlines and hotels in Europe are just as eager to get paid something - anything! - for their last-minute vacancies as ours are, so they operate loyalty programs and let people redeem their points for spoiling inventory. Hotel Tonight is still a going concern after all these years.

But the variations you see across borders do illustrate how conditions would need to change to keep new deals from coming up.

• Interchange fees. The fees merchants pay when you swipe rewards-earning credit cards pay for the benefits we receive. But they also pay for the rewards programs we take advantage of being worth operating in the first place. Lower interchange fees would cause credit card companies to reduce points earning as a first-order effect. But they’d also reduce the total number and the price of points credit card companies are willing to buy from their travel partners, and reduce the value of the partnership to those travel partners. American Express is Delta’s biggest customer because they know they can resell the points they buy from Delta to us at a profit thanks to interchange fees. If interchange fees dropped, they’d sell fewer points to us (for example, by changing earning rates) and buy fewer from Delta.

• Profit margins. I have a relative who worked at Best Buy in the early 2000’s, and he used to rave about his employee discount. He bragged about how he could get us 80%, 90%, or 95% off. But that’s not actually how the discount worked. It was what he called a “cost-plus” discount, so he paid 5% over the amount the stuff cost Best Buy wholesale. For screws, cords, wires, all the stuff that littered the aisles of Best Buy back in the 2000’s, it really was a 95% discount because Best Buy didn’t pay anything for that crap. But if you asked him about a new refrigerator, the discount was just 2-3% because the manufacturers of heavy residential appliances drive a harder bargain with Best Buy than the manufacturers of cheap plastic crap do.

Conclusion

The reason I say there will always be another deal is that I don’t see any chance that any of these conditions will go away in the American market any time soon.

Meaningful credit card rewards would go away overnight for most retail customers if the government capped interchange fees, which is why there is a credit card industry lobbying campaign to make sure that doesn’t happen, with the support of consumer-facing ghouls like Gary Leff.

But no part of this system functions without the very high profit margins of the US retail sector. No matter what you’re discounting, there’s no business in any industry that can afford to sell everything it makes for less than it paid for it forever. Fortunately, those very high profit margins are the backbone of the US economy and we have an economy-wide, all-of-government effort to ensure they stay as high as possible as long as possible.

And that is why even when a deal gets so profitable, so popular, so saturated that a higher-up does finally decide to kill it, it has never given me the slightest reason to believe there won’t be another one, because the underlying conditions that gave rise to deals in the first place have not changed.

Interchange fees make generating credit card transactions just as profitable as ever, and profit margins make it as profitable as ever to get people in your store, taking spoiling inventory off your hands.

Getting started with Aligned Incentives, the gift card reseller-cum-bill broker

When I write about gift card reselling, I usually give the rates available on the cards available for sale to CardCash.com. I do not and have never had any financial relationship with CardCash except that they buy my gift cards, let alone an affiliate relationship, but I use them as a reference for two simple reasons.

First, they are still in operation, unlike a lot of gift card resellers that have come and gone over the years.

The Plastic Merchant was one of the more notorious, if not the biggest, gift card reselling collapses because so many online travel hackers were personally affected and wrote about the resulting bloodshed.

Other long-established sites haven’t folded entirely, but have pivoted to other models. Gift Card Granny no longer buys gift cards, and is now just a skinned version of traditional gift card websites. Raise spun their gift card reselling “marketplace” into GCX, which sounds like it is narrowly targeted at people putting extremely high volume through the platform.

The second reason I use CardCash when citing gift card resale prices is that you can check their prices in real time without logging into the website or having an account. This may not sound like much, but I strongly feel that when you write for a public audience then the public should be able to easily check your work, both because it allows errors to be spotted more quickly and because I’m not interested in troubleshooting every reader’s attempts to sign up for every service I mention.

Citing a public website that works on mobile browsers solves both problems, so I cite CardCash.

Getting started with Aligned Incentives

Having said that, a number of readers reached out to encourage me to get up to speed on Aligned Incentives, for a number of very convincing reasons. Most importantly, CardCash doesn’t provide public quotes for Amazon gift cards. Aligned Incentives requires an account, but buys those gift cards at a “base” rate of 91-93.5% of face value (depending on denomination), which makes it one of the most lucrative possible ways to liquidate frequently-bonused “Zift” gift cards at grocery stores.

More about “base” purchase rates in a moment.

Aligned Incentives is open to new users, although they do require you to use Google credentials to set up your account. Their new user guide is also available to the public. It’s not great literature, but I strongly encourage you to read it start-to-finish to understand the kind of company you’ll be dealing with if you decide to proceed.

Notification settings

The very first thing you will notice after creating an account is the sudden onslaught of e-mails. This will become unbearable immediately, so you will start trying to figure out how to turn them off.

Achieve this by clicking on “Notifications” in the bottom left of the main screen:

Then “Opt out of all emails:”

This will shut off the stream of e-mail notifications for the time being.

Next, it’s time to decide what deals you actually are interested in. Expand the “Gift Cards” menu and click “Show Deal Sources,” in purple:

Here you’ll find a list of every merchant Aligned Incentives has ever issued a deal alert for, plus the all-important “Anywhere,” which is how deals are listed when they’re offering to buy gift cards without being attached to any particular deal. After unselecting all (and adding back “Anywhere,”) you should now look over this list to see which merchants apply to you.

I live in a city with both Safeway and Giant grocery stores, but without Kroger or H-E-B stores. Kroger and H-E-B may offer great deals, but I don’t want to get e-mails about them. If you live in Texas your situation might be the exact opposite!

Notifications settings will inform your dashboard

Once you’ve got your notifications set up properly, the third checkbox on the Notifications page starts doing its work: “Check this box to auto-hide deals from your dashboard that do not meet your notification requirements.” With this box checked, after a week or two (when older deals have had a chance to fall off) your “Seller Dashboard” should more or less reflect the deals that are relevant to you.

Selling gift cards

At this point, Aligned Incentives mostly works like a normal gift card reselling site, with a few nuances. First, before you submit gift cards for sale you have to “reserve” specific numbers of cards in specific denominations.

The price and volume for different denominations will be different, but fortunately most merchant gift cards don’t have purchase fees so you should be able to purchase cards in the most lucrative denominations — as long as the clerks at your local stores are willing to go along, of course.

Second, when you’re ready to submit your gift card numbers, Aligned Incentives also requires you to upload a receipt showing you purchased the cards with a credit card. This was a major source of confusion for me at first, but as I understand it they are only trying to ensure that people aren’t laundering money by purchasing gift cards with cash. They’re not verifying the actual credentials of the card you purchased.

Upon even a moment’s reflection this seems absurd: a mobster could simply give someone with a credit card the cash they wanted to launder, and the cardholder could give the gift card and the credit card receipt to the mobster. But criminals are as lazy as everybody else, so maybe adding the trivial friction of the extra step keeps the very laziest of them off the streets.

Payout timing and Aligned Incentives’ shadow banking function

The timing of gift card reselling payouts is the essence of the business: the longer the payout timeline, the longer your money is exposed to the risk of default (as illustrated most pitifully in the case of The Plastic Merchant mentioned above).

CardCash approves my submissions within one or two business days and I receive my payments within a business day or two after that, which gives a payment timeline of between 3 and 6 calendar days: a card submitted on Friday before a long weekend might not be approved until the following Tuesday, with the payment ultimately received on Wednesday or Thursday, but a submission on a working Monday is almost certainly going to be paid out by Thursday or Friday at the latest.

Aligned Incentives has a “standard” payout timeline of 2 calendar weeks from the time your gift card is submitted. Adding a business day for the ACH payment to be received, and the possibility of intervening weekends and Monday holidays, this gives a payment timeline of 15-18 calendar days.

But here Aligned Incentives introduces a secret second function: that of bill broker. This is an industry now associated (if it’s associated at all) with the history of London’s Lombard Street due to Walter Bagehot’s brilliant essay on the industry, but continues after various transfigurations to this day. A common example is freelance and platform workers, who are often offered versions of a deal where their employer offers to pay 100% of their agreed earnings in 6, 8, or 12 weeks or 95% of their pay today.

As exploitative as these employment arrangements are, they only magnify the basic logic that when you are only paid once or twice a month, you are lending your labor to your employer interest-free on the faith that they’ll have the money to pay you when your bill comes due. The sooner you’re paid, the less faith you need to place in your employer: day laborers need only a day’s worth of faith that the money will be there, and the next day are free to place their faith in another employer, perhaps with a better reputation for on-time payment.

It is generally illegal in the United States for non-banking institutions to take interest-bearing deposits. But Aligned Incentives developed a clever workaround: instead of accepting deposits and paying interest on them, they “purchase” merchandise (your gift cards) and pay higher rates for delayed payments. This is the essence of bill brokering, or what is now called “factoring” and in one of its even more esoteric forms “reverse factoring.”

Gift card sales are deposits into Aligned Incentives high-interest-rate ecosystem

What Aligned Incentives really offers is unsecured deposits into its high-interest-rate bill brokerage ecosystem. Allow me to illustrate this with a current deal.

Mid-Atlantic Giant/Stop&Shop/Martin’s grocery stores are currently awarding 8 points per dollar spent on Zift gift cards (worth 8% in grocery rewards or 8 cents per gallon at participating partner gas stations). Several Zift versions offer Amazon.com gift cards as one of many possible redemptions.

If you purchase a $250 Zift gift card, using a credit card that offers 3% in rewards, the purchase itself will generate a minimum of $27.50 in total rewards, meaning what an investor would call their “cost basis,” the amount they’re actually out-of-pocket, is down to $222.50. After converting it into an Amazon gift card, it’s worth $232.50 to Aligned Incentives in 15-18 calendar days, and you can profit $10 for your trouble.

But here Aligned Incentives offers the same deal it would otherwise be illegal for an unregulated financial institution to offer: consider your payment, which you’re entitled to in 15-18 days, as a deposit, and they’ll pay you up to 3% more if you’re willing to wait up to an additional 16 weeks (127-130 days total):

Here the same $250 Amazon gift card, purchased for the same $222.50 after rewards, is worth $239.47, a 3% cash return for leaving your $232.50 on deposit with Aligned Incentives for an additional 16 weeks.

The advantages of an an almost completely flat yield curve

I want to make one final point before concluding. A yield “curve” gets its name from the observation that most investors demand a higher interest rate on longer-term debt obligations than shorter-term ones, both because over longer periods repayment becomes more doubtful and because locking in a long-term interest rate means you’re not able to invest the same money if rates should rise before your first investment matures.

But Aligned Incentives doesn’t use that model. The interest rate they pay on delayed payments is essentially flat across the entire repayment structure:

I only say “essentially” flat because the first two (interest-free) weeks are more significant to the interest calculation the shorter the total repayment period is. The proof of this is left as an exercise for the reader.

Conclusion

To come full circle, I do not believe Aligned Incentives is an especially well-capitalized debtor that is especially likely to full its debt obligations, any more than I thought The Plastic Merchant was an especially well-run organization before they defaulted on theirs.

What I do believe is that if you are already floating debt to Aligned Incentives for payment in two weeks, you’re already taking a credit risk on their ability to fulfill their obligation. If you understand that, then you are ready to decide whether you’re willing to float the same debt for 2-16 weeks longer, with the opportunity of earning elevated returns while your money is on deposit.

“Platform risk” is the most important risk any travel hacker takes, and you should not delude yourself that gift card reselling is any exception. If Aligned Incentives goes under there’s no chance you’ll ever receive your payments, whether you made your deposit one or 126 days ago.

But if you’re willing to risk money on deposit to the platform, then they currently offer a generous annualized rate of return on those same deposits.

An excellent Just4U offer on Zillions gift cards

I’ve written several times about “Zillions”-branded gift cards, and the three broad buckets I place them into: fixed-value, loose-variable, and tight-variable. All three can be exchanged for store-specific gift cards, which can then be used or sold. While not of much interest in their own right, these cards become extremely interesting when they earn bonus points in the Just4U loyalty program shared by Safeway, Albertsons, and dozens of other sub-brands across the country, as they are through Saturday, June 28, 2025.

The deal

Zillions cards currently earn 10 Just4U points per dollar spent. These cards have no activation fees, and can be purchased with credit cards wherever employees allow it.

Most weekends, Just4U runs a stackable promotion where gift card purchases earn 2 additional bonus points per dollar (this is confusingly branded as “4 points per dollar” since gift cards earn 2 points most of the time). If that promotion runs again this Saturday, then Zillions cards should earn a total of 12 Just4U points per dollar.

I value Just4U points at roughly 1.85 cents each, so on Saturday this deal will generate a rebate of about 22.5 cents per dollar spent, plus however much you earn with your credit card on grocery store spend. If you redeem your Just4U points for the most valuable grocery redemption, you’ll receive $20 off for 1,200 points, or 1.67 cents per point.

Of course, what you’re spending the money on is a Zillions gift card, so the question is how to get your money back out of the system. As a reminder, fixed-value Zillions cards cost $100 but allow you to redeem $105 for store gift cards. The best resale rate I was able to find on CardCash was 80% on Saks OFF 5th, or $84 per fixed-value Zillions card.

The most valuable Just4U redemptions have a capped number of redemptions each week, but if you sign up for the Freshpass program, which costs $99 per year or $49 if you qualify for SNAP, then your points don’t expire, so you can redeem them for their highest value week after week.

Conclusion

This is both an outstanding deal in its own right, one I myself am planning on hitting moderately hard this Saturday, and a nice reminder that travel hacking is in so many ways a subset of extreme couponing. Stocking up on toilet paper may be less glamorous than first class flights around the world, but the principle is identical and more often than not, so are the means: pay as little as possible for the things you want or need.

Another domino falls: Giant hikes prepaid debit card fees by 34%

Over the past few years a lot of travel hackers have migrated to the ease and comfort of manufacturing spend from home. While I do plenty of manufactured spend online, I have persisted in the age-old technique of simply buying and liquidating prepaid debit cards in person. This was for three reasons.

First, I don’t find it that difficult or uncomfortable compared to some people. I’m already running around town all day, so popping into a grocery store or drugstore for a few minutes makes no difference to me whatsoever.

Second, it lets me keep an eye on what’s happening in the gift card ecosystem, for example with the release of “Zillions”-branded cards and the opportunities that came along with those.

And third, it was cheap. If a $500 card has an activation fee of $5.95, then any card that earns 3% in rewards or more (Chase Freedom Unlimited, US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards, American Express Hilton Honors Surpass) earns travel at a minimum discount of roughly 50%.

A few months ago, Safeway and CVS simultaneously replaced those $5.95-activation-fee cards with new, $7.95 cards. Meanwhile, Walgreens seems to have pulled prepaid debit cards entirely in my market, thus neutering my Freedom Unlimited bonus at drugstores.

This didn’t affect my actual volume until last week, when Giant followed suit. The changeover happened sometime between Monday, April 21, 2025, and that Thursday.

The new math and remaining opportunities

Paying $8.95 (after $1 in liquidation costs) for $509 in spend at 3% in rewards gives you a discount of a bit over 41%. This is fine, and it’s especially fine if you’re using the spend to meet the requirements for a signup bonus, since almost anything is worth doing to trigger a big enough signup bonus. But it’s a worse deal, and it’s worse by enough that I’ve finally taken a step back from in-person manufactured spend.

While there is no “bright side” to a deal getting manifestly worse, I want to highlight some of the remaining opportunities rather than give in to despair.

First, high-spend bonuses continue to augment the base value of the spend. For example, if you do carry a Hilton Honors Surpass card, then you should want to spend $15,000 per year to trigger the annual free night certificate, and if you’re spending $15,000 per year anyway, you should want to spend it in a bonus category like grocery stores, even if that bonus spend is now more expensive.

Second, grocery store loyalty programs continue to offer periodic bonuses on gift card purchases. Every few months Giant offers 2 or 3 points per dollar spent on variable Visa prepaid debit cards. During those promotions the cards are worth buying in cash, let alone with a rewards-earning credit card.

Likewise, the Safeway Just4U program has had extremely generous promotions both on branded third-party gift cards and the Zillions cards mentioned above. While liquidating those cards can be more cumbersome than prepaid debit cards (depending on whether you think reselling gift cards or buying money orders is more cumbersome), when the stars align the ultimate value proposition can be the same or higher.

Conclusion

Pricing decisions like this are interesting because from the outside we can only speculate what the interests of the different players are. As customers, our primary experience of these cards is that grocery store employees hate them because the values are so much higher than anything else they deal with they’re terrified of mishandling the transaction and losing their jobs.

But grocery stores aren’t run on behalf of their employees, and grocery store management obviously believes there is value in carrying these cards, through some combination of increased traffic (if you’re buying a gift card you might also buy your groceries on the same trip) and payments from the gift card distributor for floor space.

The gift card distributor meanwhile presumably pays third-party merchants (Adidas, Uber, whoever) a percentage of its face value when a gift card is purchased and makes money that way. How the activation fee of prepaid debit cards is split up between the grocery store, the gift card distributor, and the card issuer is a secret, but of course the higher the activation fee the more there is to split up.

And that brings us to the perfectly reasonable question of what, if anything, inflation has to do with it. Under conditions of generally rising prices, the prices of plastic, cardboard, electricity, customer support, and all the other inputs of a prepaid debit card network will also rise, so it shouldn’t be surprising that occasionally the activation fees will tick up as well.

But if that were the excuse — and it’s not my job to make up excuses! — then it would be a nice gesture if they raised the maximum value of the cards as well. After all, just like $500 doesn’t go as far now as it did in 1800, when it could buy you a reasonably sized farm in upstate New York, it doesn’t go as far as it did in 2000 either. We know there’s no technical or legal limitation on the maximum value of prepaid debit cards, since Simon Malls has sold $1,000 cards for years.

Hopefully grocery store and drugstore sales will fall by enough at the new price point that the gift card issuers will decide something along those lines has to be done.

Complete list of all 77 Zillions/Zifts bonus gift card redemption options

[edit 10/12/2024: added a correction to the conclusion]

Earlier this week I wrote about the return of my favorite Just4U promotion: bonus points on “Online Exchange” cards, which can be redeemed online for a variety of electronic gift cards, which can then be used or resold. If resold, the loss you take on the face value of the card is the price you pay for a stack of Just4U points and the value of the cards in credit card spend.

Since the last time this promotion came around, I noticed some new card designs at Safeway branded with various combinations of the words “Zillions” and “Zifts.” These cards are, like Online Exchange, issued by Pathward, N.A., and distributed and serviced by our old friends at InComm financial services. I heard these cards were earning bonus points during the current promotion (ending Saturday, October 12, 2024), so I popped over to Safeway to pick one up and see how they work.

The two designs in my store were a “Zillions” card with a variable load amount up to $500 and a fixed value card that offered $105 in value for $100. Neither card, however, listed the merchants for whose gift cards the value could be redeemed, and the redemption website ZillionsGift.com infuriatingly does not list them until you enter a valid redemption code, so for the sake of my beloved readers I picked up a fixed value card and found out for myself.

The first thing I found out was that these cards are not earning the full 10 Just4U points per dollar under the current promotion; I earned just 800 points for my $100 card. My lightly-informed speculation is that the promotion is coded to add 8 points per dollar for a total of 10 points per dollar, since most gift cards earn 2 points per dollar year round. Since these cards are new, they may not be coded to earn that base 2 points per dollar, so during the current promotion they’re only earning the promotional 8 points. Again, that’s just my speculation based on many years of taking advantage of promotions like this. It may be a regional or brand difference instead; find out for yourself and let me know!

Complete list of fixed-value Zillions of Zifts gift card redemption options

Having acquired a redemption code, I plugged it into the redemption portal. Here are the current options for redemptions (they say these are subject to change and I don’t doubt them):

• adidas ($5 - $500)

• Aerie ($5 - $500)

• Aéropostale ($5 - $500)

• AMC Theatres ($5 - $200)

• American Eagle ($5 - $500)

• Applebee’s ($5 - $500)

• Baby Depot at Burlington ($10 - $250)

• Baker’s Square Gift Card ($5 - $500)

• Banana Republic ($10 - $500)

• Bass Pro Shops ($5 - $500)

• Belk ($25 - $500)

• Blaze Pizza ($5 - $250)

• Bob Evans Restaurants ($15 - $500)

• Build-A-Bear Workshop ($5 - $500)

• Cabela's ($5 - $500)

• California Pizza Kitchen ($5 - $500)

• Carters & Oshkosh ($5 - $500)

• Paramount+ ($25, $50)

• Chart House ($10 - $500)

• Chico’s ($10 - $500)

• Chili’s Grill & Bar ($5 - $100)

• Chuck E. Cheese ($5 - $250)

• Columbia Sportswear Company ($5 - $500)

• Dickey’s BBQ ($5 - $500)

• Domino’s ($5 - $100)

• DSW ($5 - $500)

• Famous Dave's ($5 - $250)

• Fanatics ($5 - $500)

• Fandango ($25, $50)

• GNC ($10 - $250)

• GolfNow ($25 - $250)

• H&M ($5 - $300)

• IHOP ($5 - $200)

• KingsIsle Combo Card ($10, $20)

• Kirkland’s Home ($5 - $250)

• Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation ($5 - $200)

• L.L.Bean ($5 - $500)

• Lane Bryant ($5 - $500)

• Main Event ($25, $50)

• Maurices ($5 - $500)

• McCormick & Schmick’s ($10 - $500)

• Michaels ($5 - $500)

• Mix It Up ($5 - $200)

• MLB Shop ($5 - $500)

• Morton's The Steakhouse ($10 - $500)

• NBA Store ($5 - $500)

• NFLShop.com ($5 - $500)

• NHL Shop ($5 - $500)

• O’Charley’s ($5 - $500)

• P.F. Chang’s ($10 - $500)

• Rainforest Cafe ($10 - $500)

• Regal ($5 - $100)

• REI ($10 - $500)

• Saks Fifth Avenue ($5 - $500)

• Saks OFF 5TH ($5 - $500)

• Saltgrass Steak House ($10 - $500)

• Smashburger ($5 - $500)

• Smoothie King E-Gift Card ($10 - $100)

• Soma Gift Card ($10 - $500)

• Spa & Wellness Gift Card by Spa Week ($5 - $500)

• Sportsman’s Warehouse ($5 - $500)

• Stitch Fix ($5 - $500)

• Texas Roadhouse ($5 - $100)

• TGI Fridays ($5 - $500)

• The Children’s Place ($5 - $500)

• Ulta Beauty ($5 - $500)

• Under Armour ($5 - $500)

• Village Inn Gift Card ($5 - $500)

• Vudu ($25 - $100)

• White House Black Market ($10 - $500)

• Xbox Digital Gift Card ($15, $25, $50)

I did some spot checks on this list and found that CardCash buys Adidas gift cards for 80.5% of face value and Columbia gift cards for 82% of face value, which is relevant when deciding how much you’re willing to pay for your Just4U points.

Variable load cards have different options

When I first grabbed the bonused fixed value card I was hopeful that the variable cards would have the same list of merchants, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Listed on the front of the variable cards are several merchants missing from this list:

Conclusion, and warning

[correction: I did not realize Bloomingdale’s cards have to be mailed in to CardCash, eliminating that as a liquidation option. The next best Gift of Choice card I’ve identified is Nordstrom Rack, which pays out 81.5% on CardCash.]

It’s good to stay on top of new gimmicks as they come along in this game, but for now these cards appear to be strictly inferior to the older “Gift of Choice” cards, at least if your plan is to liquidate them to cash through reselling. Both brands have an option that pays 82% on CardCash (Columbia in the case of Zillions/Zifts, Bloomingdale’s in the case of Gift of Choice). It’s true the $5 bonus on $100 Zillions cards increases your payout by a free 5%, but if Gift of Choice cards earn 10, 12, or 14 points per dollar then the higher rewards swamp the effect of the lower payout. If the rewards earned on both types were identical, on the other hand, then the 5% bonus would be decisive.

Finally, a word of caution: since I redeemed my $105 card this morning I have not received any communications from them, neither confirming the redemption nor, even more importantly, actually sending me the Columbia gift card I ordered. I can look up my order in their system, which has my correct e-mail address and the correct details for the order, so it hasn’t been lost, but it hasn’t found its way to me.

As always, if you can’t be without money as long as it takes to fight to get it back, then don’t spend it on travel hacking!

Quick hit: Hyatt Milestone 2K Next Stay Awards don't stack, but do post on award stays

I’ve been plugging along earning top-tier Hyatt Globalist status through manufactured spend on the Chase World of Hyatt credit card, and recently hit the 30-night and 40-night milestones in quick succession. With no obvious reason to choose the other options, I selected the 2K Next Stay Award for each milestone.

As long-time readers may remember, I used to live in Madison, WI, and return several times a year to visit old friends there. I usually stay at the Hyatt Place Madison/Downtown, a Category 3 property that costs 9,000-15,000 World of Hyatt points per night. At the lower end of that range, that’s a terrific value for World of Hyatt points transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards. At the higher end, it’s a great value for Category 1-4 Free Night Certificates earned on the Chase World of Hyatt credit card.

What I didn’t know was whether both my 2K Next Stay Awards would be triggered by a single stay. Fortunately, I had two stays planned (with the week in between spent on Madeline Island, the largest of Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands).

As it turned out, each of the two stays triggered a single 2K Next Stay Award. This ended up working fine for me given my travel plans, but the awards do have expiration policies to be aware of: they have to be selected (the other options at each of the 20-night and 30-night milestones are two club access awards and $25 FIND experience credits) and then used within the specified time periods, so unless you already have plans to visit a Hyatt House or Hyatt Place, or a property with a club, there’s no point in selecting your awards prematurely. Just set a calendar reminder to make sure you pick something!

Finally, note that the 2K Next Stay Awards did post on both my stays, despite being booked entirely with points and free night awards. This wasn’t surprising (Hyatt treats award stays as “eligible stays” for virtually all their promotions) but it was important to me to verify and pass along.

At the 40-night and 50-night Milestone levels I assume I’ll pick the 5,000 bonus point awards unless I see suite availability for an uncoming trip; I can use the free Guest of Honor award at the 40-night level to get club access if an upcoming stay has a club, although that’s not typical for the domestic properties I stay at.

My successful experience replacing an Incomm Visa prepaid card

There is, by all accounts, an epidemic of fraud striking prepaid debit card retailers across the Western United States. I’ve had the remarkable good fortune of never encountering a tampered prepaid debit card in the wild. So when I needed an Incomm prepaid debit card replaced this month, I jumped at the opportunity to find out how the process works in practice.

Fraud has become a huge problem, but not my problem

If you visit manufactured spend forums you quickly find an ocean of complaints about gift card fraud. Not the “elder abuse” fraud that newspapers love to write about, but genuine larceny: card packaging is opened, the details of the card are swiped, then the card is repackaged so that when an unsuspecting customer activates the card, the balance is quickly drained by the fraudsters. I don’t have a representative sample but it sounds like there are at least some stores on the West Coast where almost every card seems to have been tampered with.

This was not my problem. My problem was that I messed up the magnetic stripe on a card. In other words, user error. Since the balance was still there and I had the card details, I could have liquidated the card online for a tax payment, or to reload my Amazon balance, but instead I called up Incomm to see what the process was to replace the card.

Incomm prepaid card Replacement process

When I realized my error, I first called the number on the back of my Visa prepaid card (833-322-6760). During that call, which according to my phone lasted 17 minutes, I provided the usual card information, as well as the prepaid card’s “serial number,” which is located on the bottom right quadrant of the back of the card, as well as on the card packaging. The phone representative also asked for my name and address. Finally, he asked me to send “copies” of the receipt, the front and back of the prepaid card, as well as my government ID, to “consumed@incomm.com”. I took photos of the documents using my phone on my dining room table.

I first sent the documents on Friday, December 1, 2023, and on Monday, December 4, I received an e-mail from the same address asking for copies of the front of the card and the receipt again. I immediately submitted new pictures.

On Monday, December 11, I received a new card via USPS first class mail. That card had to be activated over the phone, which according to my phone records took 1 minute. I had the option to set a PIN over the phone or use any 4 digits on the new card’s first use, like a normal Incomm prepaid debit card. The card could be and was immediately liquidated through one of my usual in-person channels.

Conclusion

Obviously I wasn’t going to freak out over holding a card for 10 days instead of my usual 90 minutes, but despite my story being anti-climactic there are some obvious lessons you may need a refresher on if you’ve gotten lazy in your manufactured spend routine:

1. Keep your cards, receipts and packaging together. You can use filing cabinets, ziplock bags (guilty) or anything else you like, but if you get a fradulent or defective card you will want to be able to pull everything out at once without having to triple check card numbers and your purchase dates and times. Any unforced errors you make are going to slow down the replacement process.

2. Act quickly. In the case of tampered cards this is more important, but even if you mess up your own card, Incomm isn’t going to replace it until you contact them. Set aside 20 minutes and pick up the phone.

3. Don’t float more than you can afford to. I got stuck with $500 in the ether for 10 days, which didn’t bother me because it was a short period and a reasonable amount. If I’d just bought $10,000 worth of cards and needed them all replaced before my next credit card bill was due, I’d have been sweating a lot harder!

Gift of Choice, the new (to me) restricted gift card product

Last week I had the opportunity to try a brand of “merchant-restricted” gift cards I hadn’t used before: the “Gift of Choice” cards sold by Safeway and “powered” by The Gift Card Shop. This gimmick, the merchant-restricted gift card, is has come around repeatedly over the years.

Five Back Visa gift cards are a way to earn a 5% rebate at certain merchants, including at Bed Bath & Beyond, a formerly-ubiquitous shopping mall staple that used to sell a variety of home goods, but also PIN-enabled Visa prepaid debit cards, leading to a negative-cost manufactured spend technique.

Happy Cards used to be physical gift cards that were (supposedly) limited to use at the merchants specified on the card. Judging by the website they seem to have mostly abandoned that model and now sell codes you exchange online for merchant gift cards.

That’s precisely the model used by Gift of Choice: you buy some flimsy cardboard packaging, scratch off some codes on the back, and redeem them for the digital gift card of your choice.

The Deal: 10 Just4U points per dollar

During the promotion last week, you would earn 10 Safeway Just4U points per dollar spent on Gift of Choice gift card codes, obviously in addition to any rewards you normally earn on grocery store purchases.

I normally value Just4U Rewards (100 points) at “about” $2.78 each (my valuation has increased since I wrote this post for a variety of reasons), so on a $500 Gift of Choice purchase (50 Rewards) I earn a rebate of about $139. I also save the $5.95 I’d pay to activate a $500 Visa prepaid debit card, while earning the same credit card rewards (minus the rewards on the $5.95 activation fee, natch).

Gift of Choice sells their redemption codes with a variety of merchants listed on the front, although I believe you can redeem the cards for any of their supported merchants regardless of the specific version you buy (I can’t check anymore because I’ve already fully redeemed all the cards I purchased, which deactivates their numbers). You can also split the value of the Gift of Choice code into multiple different merchant gift cards, and you don’t need to redeem the full value all at once, so you can spend it down over time.

The gift cards you receive after redeeming Gift of Choice codes are “real” electronic gift cards: you can check their balance online and spend the cards directly at the merchant, and gift card resellers shouldn’t have a problem with them, as long as they accept electronic gift cards.

I bought a Gift of Choice version listing Lowe’s as a redemption option, and redeemed my $500 codes for $500 Lowe’s gift cards. CardCash offers $412.50 in cash for $500 Lowe’s gift cards, or $457.88 in Hotels.com gift cards. Since I book most of my non-points stays through Hotels.com, those gift cards are worth almost the same as cash to me, and that’s how I liquidated the cards, paying $42.12 for at least 9,100 Alaska Airlines miles, or a maximum of 0.46 cents per mile.

Obviously, if you can actually use a gift card at a participating merchant, then your value proposition will look even better, and there are some moderately useful merchants in the system. If you grab fast food regularly, you can stock up on Taco Bell, Domino’s, and Subway gift cards. If you are in the market for athletic wear, Columbia, Under Armor, and Athleta are options; they sell some expensive stuff, and a 28% discount is nothing to sneeze at.

An intriguing possibility is to redeem your Gift of Choice codes for Xbox gift cards. My understanding is that these cards, in addition to games and loot crates and whatnot, can also be spent on Microsoft devices. I have no idea what the current state of the market is, but when consoles were in short supply ambitious resellers spent a lot of time buying and selling them, which may be a way to liquidate Gift of Choice cards at face value or for a profit.

The curious case of the code format

If and when this deal returns and you decide to pursue it, you’ll notice something right away I may as well mention now. I’ve been referring to Gift of Choice redemption “codes” throughout this post, because that’s how the system is supposed to work: you scratch off a little aluminum panel to reveal a series of numbers you redeem online.

But those numbers are actually formatted as a 16-digit “card number” starting with 4, a 3-digit CVV code, and a 4-digit expiration date. In other words, they’re formatted as a Visa card, and the card number satisfies the Luhn algorithm. The specific 6-digit BIN identifier (465568), according to numerous free and disreputable online services, is registered to a Swiss private bank, for whatever that’s worth.

What does this mean? I have no idea — I already explained how I liquidated my cards. But if someone is out there liquidating Gift of Choice cards online at face value as Visa cards, they’re not shouting it from the rooftops. The funniest possible case would be if they can be used as Visa cards, but only within Switzerland. Still, I have no reason to believe they can be used as Visa cards at all.

Don't sleep on the American Express Hilton Surpass $5,000 threshold bonuses through June 30, 2021

For obvious reasons since early last year I’ve been focusing my manufactured spend on cards earning cash back or rewards easily converted to cash or paid travel, and slacking off on the few remaining co-branded credit cards I carry. That allowed it to completely slip my mind that the American Express Hilton Honors Surpass card has been running a fairly compelling deal, for 10,000 bonus Honors points each time you spend $5,000 on the card, up to 100,000 points when you spend $50,000. If all of your Surpass spend is in the card’s 6-points-per-dollar categories, that works out to 8 Honors points per dollar each time your cumulative spend reaches a $5,000 threshold.

The offer ends June 30, 2021, but it’s well worth checking how close you are to the next threshold and seeing if any additional local gas station or grocery store bonuses make it worth closing the gap. Speaking from personal experience, I received a “Thanks for using your Amex Offer” e-mail as soon as a purchase put me over the $5,000 threshold, so you shouldn’t need to wait or worry about whether your purchase has triggered the threshold bonus.

In my experience Hilton Honors points are consistently worth about half a cent each, which makes this a 4% rebate at gas stations and grocery stores, with the potential for outsized return at specific properties and when using the 5th-night-free benefit on award stays.

Finally, if you plan on meeting the $15,000 annual spend threshold to receive a free weekend night certificate (and if you aren’t planning on meeting the spend threshold you shouldn’t be carrying the card and paying its annual fee), then it’s obviously better to meet that spend threshold while the same spend also counts towards the extra bonus point threshold. Free night certificates and bonus points: two great tastes that taste great together.

Safeway versus Giant: Value, Scale, and Timing

As so often happens in the grocery store rewards game, when it rains it pours, with both Safeway and Giant currently offering big bonuses on the purchase of “Happy” brand gift cards. This family of gift cards can be loaded with up to $500, and each sub-brand can only be used at specific merchants, where they are processed as credit cards. They can be easy or difficult to turn into more universally accepted prepaid debit cards depending on the merchants you have convenient.

Safeway versus Giant: Value

Through April 10, 2021, the purchase of Happy gift cards at Safeway will earn 8 Just4U points, while their purchase at Giant/Stop&Shop/Martin’s stores will earn 8 Flexible Rewards points. As the name suggests, Flexible Rewards points are more flexible than Just4U points, since they can be redeemed down to the penny for almost anything in the store. If you’re able to redeem them at scale, however, Just4U points are somewhat more valuable: if you can redeem your entire balance of Just4U Rewards for their maximum value you can get over 1.3 cents per point, or a 10.56% rebate on the purchase of Happy gift cards (plus any credit card rewards earned on the purchase), and you can take advantage of the Just4U double dip to even redeem some of them against otherwise-forbidden goods like liquid dairy products.

In other words, if you have equally convenient access to both stores, and can maximize the value of your points in either program, you should treat 8 Just4U points as “somewhat” more valuable than the same number of Flexible Rewards points.

Safeway versus Giant: Scale

If you don’t have the time or inclination to maximize the value of Just4U points, then Flexible Rewards are clearly superior. Capped monthly rewards redemptions and quick expiration make it pointless to earn more than a few thousand Just4U points. You could easily maximize the value of the entire Safeway promotion in a single trip and just one or two Happy gift cards. Exploiting the higher value of Just4U points requires a disproportionate level of planning, networking and attention to detail, while maximizing the value of Flexible Rewards points requires nothing more than doing your shopping as usual, scanning your card, and walking out with free groceries.

Safeway versus Giant: Timing

The two factors above should do 100% of the work for 90% of listeners. Do you have access to both Safeway and Giant stores? If not, your decision has been made for you. Are you a detail-oriented control freak or do you just want to score some free groceries? If the former, Safeway’s your store; if the latter, Giant’s for you.

There’s one final consideration I want to put out for the remaining 10%: even if you are comfortable maximizing the value of Just4U points, you may want to consider hitting Giant first, and waiting until May 1 to take advantage of Safeway’s offer.

That’s for two reasons. First, Giant’s offer ends earlier, on Thursday, April 29, while Safeway’s runs through May 10, 2021 (as long as you add the offer to your Just4U accounts while it’s still available in the app and online).

The second reason is more pedantic: Just4U points expire at the end of the month in which they’re earned. That means points earned between now and April 30 will expire at the end of May, while points earned between May 1 and May 10 will expire at the end of June (for the clipping of rewards that will themselves expire at the end of July). Especially if you’re already exhausted your April redemption opportunities, waiting until May 1 to begin refilling your Just4U balance will give you a lot more time to ultimately redeem your points.

Conclusion

Obviously if you don’t drive much or spend much on groceries there’s not necessarily any reason to try to maximize both of these promotions, and it’s perfectly reasonable to keep life simple by focusing on just one (or neither). But these are at least some of the factors you should consider when weighing grocery store bonus rewards against one another.