We maintain a Manufactured Spending Complete Guide and periodically publish an update on “what still works” (which is due for an update), so I dabble in the various methods to keep things up-to-date. This weekend, I got a reminder that things can and will go wrong sometimes, resulting in a loss of time, money, points, or all of the above. Fortunately, the only thing I lost was time — but it felt like a failure in terms of the time spent for a small gain, and it was a good reminder of the types of things that can go wrong and derail your day.
Generous Amex Offer for Staples & Lowe’s
Last month, Stephen reported on generous Amex Offers that were targeted on Amex business cards: 10% back at Staples, Lowe’s, and several other merchants (See: New 10% Amex Offers: Staples, Lowe’s, Exxon Mobil & Dell (Business Cards Only)). An interesting thing about those offers is that neither the Staples nor Lowe’s offers excluded physical gift cards in-store. The Lowe’s offer excluded electronic gift cards. The Staples offer excluded gift cards “in bulk purchases”, but it is my understanding that this refers to a bulk purchasing program for business customers (like perhaps a business that wanted to sell Staples gift cards and get a small discount on a large quantity). I wouldn’t expect four or five gift cards to constitute a bulk purchase. The moral of the story is that gift cards seemed to be in play with both retailers in-store.
While those offers have been out for a month, I just got a chance to try to put them to use this weekend.
Going all-in at once
One of the key things to learn when getting started with MS is to take it slow. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor do you need to clear a store out of gift cards in one shot.
That said, I’ve mentioned before the fact that I live in the middle of nowhere. Some people claim to live in the middle of nowhere, yet they live in a small city of 30-40K people. By contrast, my town has a population of about 1,000 people (and probably 3,000 cows). You can’t see another house from where I live, but you could have seen a bear on my lawn a couple of weekends ago. Any given day, deer, turkeys, rabbits, and various furry forms of life are a regular sighting. Home is rural, which certainly has its advantages. On the other hand, it unfortunately means that the closest Staples is about 70 miles away. There’s a Lowe’s about 30 miles away — but as you can imagine, I’m not passing either store regularly.
However, over the weekend, I was in a larger area with several Staples and Lowe’s locations and I had a few hours of unplanned free time. I decided that I would make a loop and purchase some gift cards. Since I don’t get the chance to do this every day, I figured I’d go ahead and max out the offer on a couple of my cards. That was mistake #1.
Declined at the first stop
As the offer is good for 10% back up to a total of $100 in statement credits (i.e. 10% back on up to $1,000 in purchases), I attempted to buy $1,000 in gift cards at the first stop. While I have purchased gift cards before with the Amex card I tried to use, I hadn’t used it much in the past few months. The payment terminal came up with a message asking for a different payment method. I didn’t think that running it a second time would help, so I tried a different card. The purchase went through.
As I went out to my car, I got a call from Amex looking to verify the first attempted charge. I verified that it was me and they told me that I could now try the charge again. I explained that I’d already used a different card but that I would be using this card again later if it would work. The agent said it would.
Declined at the second stop
My second stop was at a Lowe’s, where I brought $1,000 in gift cards to the register. After ringing them up, I put in the card that had been declined at Stop #1…and it got declined again. Trying to use that card again was mistake #2. There was nobody behind me in line (and a few empty cashiers), so I asked the cashier to give me a second to get this resolved with Amex. Sure enough, they called within a minute.
The agent I spoke with seemed to have some trouble re-activating my card initially, but he got it figured out and I was able to successfully make the purchase while I had him on the phone. I hung up after the payment terminal said “approved”.
And then the cashier made a confused sound as she squinted at the screen. She re-scanned one of the gift cards and still got an error message: one of the gift cards failed to active. The cashier told me that I had to bring the card and receipts to customer service and they could help me.
I explained the situation to the customer service rep (we’ll call her “Cheryl”), who thankfully seemed to understand what was going on even if she didn’t have any idea how to fix it: I had paid $1,000, but only had $800 in activated gift cards since once card failed to activate. She scanned a couple of things to no avail, so she called Lowe’s IT support. I could only hear one side of that conversation, but I could tell that the tech had told her to try to refund that item number. Cheryl (the Lowe’s in-store rep) explained that I had purchased 5 of the same item number, so she wouldn’t know which one got refunded if she did that. This came back up again later, and I’m extremely thankful that I was dealing with a rep who thought that through rather than just doing what the IT person on the phone told her to do. Essentially, IT was saying to just refund one of item #XXXX — but the problem with that was that she might have invalidated a second card if she did that, leaving me with $600 in good cards. Eventually, IT concluded with her that since I had made the purchase mere minutes ago (it didn’t exactly feel that way between the time I spent waiting in the customer service line and the time that Cheryl had been working on this, but whatever), it wasn’t yet showing up in the computer system for someone in IT to be able to get a more detailed look at it. I was told I would need to come back in 30 minutes.
I didn’t love that idea for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was wondering whether or not I would deal with the same person a second time. However, Cheryl had the foresight to get a ticket number from the IT department and she photocopied my receipt and stapled it to the ticket number and left it at the register. Luckily, there was a Walmart next door where I could kill some time waiting in line in the interim.
Lucky for a good customer service rep
I returned to Lowe’s ~30 minutes later and of course Cheryl wasn’t standing there. The rep I got was new, so she called over a manager, who similarly had no idea what to do. The manager said we should call Cheryl, and I was thankful for that.
So Cheryl comes back and scans the receipt again and gets the same result that isn’t allowing her to do what she needs to do. I think the problem was that she was unable to refund the failed gift card since the system was (accurately) showing that the gift card hadn’t been activated. That kind of makes sense — if I pulled a card off the rack and brought it to customer service without paying for it, the computer wouldn’t let them give me money back. The electrical signal between the synapses of Lowe’s internal IT wasn’t putting together the fact that I was charged for this card even though it wasn’t active.
She called IT and once again IT told her to just refund the item number…and once again, she explained that I had 5 of the same item number and that technique wouldn’t work since she wouldn’t know which one got refunded — she needed to specifically refund the right one. I again found myself thankful that Cheryl was an independent thinker. I could imagine another rep just doing what the IT line told them to do, causing even more trouble. The idea of just refunding the whole transaction was floated for a moment. While I’d rather do that than lose $200, I didn’t want to try my twice-declined card a third time for a large purchase.
Eventually, she told me to grab another card while she was on the phone. By the time I got back to the register, she had figured it out and refunded me for the gift card that didn’t activate. I would need to purchase that last card anew. I used a different Amex card on that purchase — which is exactly what I didn’t want to do from the beginning in order to stay organized (now I need to remember that I’ve only spent $200 at Lowe’s on that card, yet I’ve spent $X at Staples, etc). Oh well — I walked out with the cards. Before I walked out, I opened them and called the number on the back to verify balances, and all was correct.
I drove to one more Staples location and tried to make a single gift card purchase (mixed with something else I needed to buy). My card got declined again…at which point, I admitted defeat and used my Ink Plus, hoping I’ll live to fight another day with this one.
Lessons learned
Unfortunately, that whole process took a lot longer in real life than the written version. In total, I went to 1 Lowe’s store, 2 Staples locations, and two Walmarts and I ended up with just $2,200 in gift cards (only $2K of which had been on Amex cards). I spent about an hour in the car from place to place and an additional 2.5+ hours between declined transactions, waiting in line, and the inactive card. That didn’t feel nearly as productive as I’d hoped when I began plotting out a route that morning.
But I “learned” a few things (in quotes because these are really things we should already know):
- Go slow. Had I just bought a couple hundred bucks at each place, I probably would have made it to a few more stores with a lot less headache.
- If at first you don’t succeed, maybe don’t try try again. I should have just given Card #1 a rest after the first declined transaction.
- Pay attention to what the cashier is doing. Had the customer service rep at Lowe’s simply refunded a random gift card as IT was telling her to and had I not been paying attention, I might have walked out with an even bigger headache than wasted time.
And really, the biggest reminder I got out of this was that this is a slow grind to earning points if you can’t scale it up, and I obviously failed to do that this time around. Last weekend, I sold this grill:
I earned more points when I purchased it than I did on gift card purchases this weekend and I resold it for a greater profit. I did have to drive about 2.5 hours round trip to drop it off, but the juice was worth the squeeze in terms of profit (the points were just gravy). I don’t do as much reselling these days as I used to due to time constraints, but I continue to dabble — and it often reminds me that while merchandise has its own set of risks and headaches, it has advantages in terms of profit, reduced bank attention, and reduced time spent staring into space waiting on line.
I’ll keep dabbling in various forms of MS. I’ve done it enough to know that while momma said there’d be days like this, there are both better and worse days to come as well. While this trip around was kind of frustrating and slow and it felt like a failure in terms of the return for my time, the thrill of the hunt for more points will likely lure me back another day.
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Has anyone figured out what causes the failed activation? I have gone 2 or 3 times and 2 or 3 VGCs failed to activate
I was able to buy Southwest Gift Cards or Amazon Gift Cards at Staples previously with Staples Gift Cards but as of last week – their systems are not accepting Staples GC (in store) for payment when there are these or any 3rd party gift cards
1,000 people vs 3,000 cows lol
The Smell when they turn the fields and airport travel time too.
CHEERs
Given that you’re writing for this site, perhaps jumping on an offer more than a month after most people isn’t the best plan? A lot of this information has been discussed in public for some time.
Yea Lowes has velocity limits hard coded. Just use the Check Spending Power in the Amex app. Never had an issue if I pre-clear transactions.
Interesting on the pre-clearance strategy. When you said that, my first thought was “but my limit is higher than the $1K I was trying to spend” — but then I realized that pre-clearing it alerts them to the fact that you plan to make such a purchase. Interesting strategy. Thanks.
velocity limit? The transaction was approved, but the last 2 times I have gone, 2 or 3 cards don’t activate.
Card was refunded at CS desk, we attempt 2 more purchases and and it was approved, but activation failed.
This happened to me twice with 3 out of 10 cards not activating. The first time, customer service desk was able to figure how to give me a refund. The second time I was able to convince the cashier, after she called the supervisor over, to scan new Amazon GCs when the screen prompted to do so (instead of trying to rescan random cards from the pile) and it worked. The POS system has a prompt that clearly says something like “card ending XXXX failed please scan a new card”.
Of course it had to happen to me too after this article came out.
I’ve had no issues on my 4 previous trips. But, earlier today after payment it prompted for a rescan on 3 cards, but eventually it stopped and only 3 activation receipts came out, I purchased 5.
Head cashier knew how to refund me.
Yes, we knew which card didn’t activate based on the POS system and receipt showing the last 4 from the barcode. The problem in my case is that it wouldn’t let the cashier refund that one….and so IT was telling her just to refund the item number. That’d be great if the system automatically refunded the barcode number that was not activated, but she wasn’t sure it would do that if she just had it refund one of item #XXXX. So we knew which one was not activated, it was just figuring out how to refund that one that seemed to be the issue. Glad to hear others have enounctered cashiers who knew how to do it….
Again, you do NOT need the specific card to refund!
You just need the SAME ITEM Number to perform the refund. On my refund receipt it just has the item number and the description WITHOUT any specific Gebit Card.
Your Cheryl while is helpful, she has no clue how the refund should be processed.
All she needs to do is to scan your original purchase receipt, then do the refund in the quantity which in your case is 2. THAT IS IT.
Cheryl is OVERTHINKING IT and made it way more complicated than it could have been.
The HARDEST PART is to convince the store to perform a refund or to do a new card. In the case of Velocity decline, there is NO WAY to do a new card so the only option is to perform a refund which is extremely EASY.
I see. She (and I) thought that it would invalidate one of the cards that way. Thanks for the info!
Hi all, How do you all use these gift cards? I have a few Visa (simon cards) that haven’t been able to unload anymore now that Bluebird is gone. I appreciate feedback to help me to get rid of them. I use my credicard (Chase and AmEX) for all my purchases. Is there anything like Bluebird that I can use?
See the Manufactured Spending Complete Guide linked in the first sentence of this post for some ideas.
There are still a lot of GC buyers out there post TPM falling.
I’ve bought $927 of VGCs from Staples.com in 2 transactions with no problems. (bought 1 card @$309 to make sure it works, then bought 2 cards @ $618 to max it out). The typical “Great News!” email never comes from Amex, but the 10% credits have been applied to my account with no problem. I’ve received and activated all cards, no issues.
Any reason not to do the AMEX Staples offer online? Buy 3 $300 Visas for $927? I just ordered mine this weekend and immediately got the “thank you for using your offer” email from AMEX. If it works, and it seems like it will, that’s good profit for very modest effort.
Nope, no reason not to do that. I expected to be able to hit 5 or 6 stores in one day (and many were near Lowe’s locations, so double that overall). If I only expected to successfully get one Staples, I would have gone the online route also.
That said, I received one report from a reader who ordered a bunch online and his first several orders went through without issue, then they all started getting cancelled. When he talked to Staples’ customer support, they told him that they were cancelling gift card orders placed with an Amex due to this offer. I haven’t found any other supporting data points, but thought it was interesting that Staples support offered that as the reason for the cancellations.
I’ve been ordering 3rd party gift cards online at Staples without issue. They arrive 2-3 hours after I order. I haven’t bought Visa/MC’s though – only 3rd party. Have bought as much as $575 at one time.
Have you gotten Amex offer cash back?
Yes – on multiple purchases.
It works but you should space your orders so to avoid the issue of not receiving some orders but there is no way to identify WHICH order(s) have not been received.
The offer is good till 11/30, in theory. My practice is to do one offer at a time. Only place a second order after the previous order’s GCs are received – because GCM can send the activation code before the cards – On one order the activation code arrived 5 days before the cards arrived. If it is the opposite, it is easy to resolve but if you dont have the physical cards, but the activation codes, you be worried a bit because over the phone activation is extremely easy – i,e, anyone who got your mail containing the cards, could activate those over the phone!
I haven’t tried the Lowe’s GC yet. I guess I’ll have to hop on that. However, at Staples I was able to break it down into several smaller purchases with each of three Amex’s. It worked without any issues – except I learned that ONE of the cards was only “2x points” rather than 10% off, which kinda stunk.
I think “MS inconvenience” is more appropriate than an MS” Fail”
Good suggestion. I was thinking a fail in terms of the return on my time invested, and in terms of my grand plan of hitting up many more stores than I did, but you make a good point.
I liked the original title (post too). It’s good to be honest about time spent and to acknowledge that many of these things only make sense when you are able to scale (which you did bring up).
I don’t know if this is relevant, but, this past weekend, I had “regular” transactions at the pump rejected on my AMEX Everyday Preferred with the text message and email verifications, and it eventually worked at another location. Curiously, it happened during a weekend road trip to Galveston (I live in a similar rural area South of Dallas), and I have had similar rejections during 200-400 mile road trips, while none in Thailand, Russia or Mexico.
And, Lowe’s IT is notoriously sluggish around here.
My point… Might it be more error than a preconceived issue?
Last weekend I attempted to purchase $1000 in VGC at Staples.
My AMX was initially declined and I then tried to swipe it which also was declined. Cashier then asked me to insert card backwards which I did and this caused the machine to request a swipe. I swiped and the cashier did something to make the transaction work.
Received standard email about qualifying for AMX offer.
A few days later AMX offer had not posted and a quick chat solved that problem.
I am thinking if this is what I need to do – Two weeks ago I purchased 3x$300 VGC and 1x$50 Uber Gc online. Received a message about qualifying Amex offer. Charge for uber gc posted first and I got $5 credit. Charges for VGC posted a week or so later, and since June 20 there is no credit for these transactions. Should I chat with Amex? I don’t want really to bring attention to the purchases.
Lowe’s has very strict hard coded velocity limits. If u hit them the cards just won’t activate.
That’s kind of what I figured. I’d obviously never done much at one time at Lowe’s before.
I learned this the hard way also – since I’m locked out of Chase cards I maximize Amex MR and tried using the Blue Business card with the extra Lowe’s point offer to try to get 3X MR buying Amazon GC’s for large purchases on Amazon now that the JetBlue deal is gone. Spent hours at Lowe’s trying to fix/get refunded for thousands in Amazon gift cards that got charged to the card but failed to activate. Not wanting to give up too easily (I should have) I tried again several weeks later at a different Lowe’s with the same result.
This is a long post with details on my experiences on failed activation cards.
One is due to Velocity issue which is a store can only sell 3 Gebits in every 60 min. Hard-coded, store-wide and system-wide.
The Velocity issue has been discovered and reported by numerous readers on DoC’s site from the very beginning of the promo, i.e. 3 or 4 weeks ago.
The non-activated cards are very easy to identify because the POS screen literally told the cashier which cards not activated, and to “recan the card xxxxxx” That is the code above the Bar Code at the back of the card. Unfortunately this message is totally misleading as re-scan would NOT work.
Most stores do not really know what is going on when they first encounter this, but some managers are more willing to help. They would call Corporate Help Desk and eventually being told the velocity issue so refund issued right when you are there.
AMEX would show a bunch of in and out statement credit transaction under My Savings. However so far based on 3 real-life DPs, there was no crawl back on the refunded part that was due to velocity.
HOWEVER, there would also be not-properly activated cards when there was communication failure or something.
I happened to encounter one such occasions. It took a long time for the register to print out receipt and the corresponding activation slips.
Unfortunately when I went home and checked the cards online – I got technical error on the screen. CS told me NONE of the 3 cards were activated and I needed to return to the store to get it activated again.
Needless to say, it was a struggle to get this sorted out – the CS manager at first refused to do anything. I finally got her to listen to what the Everywhere CS rep said that the store did not properly activate the card and the store needed to talk to their Help Desk to resolve this.
Finally the CS manager called HQ Help Desk and was asked were those BlackHawk cards…. She had to look at package and confirmed back. Help Desk told her to call BlackHawk with a number that was NOT on the package, AND could NOT be found even by Googling… So this is an Internal number between retailers and BlackHawk…
Because the CS desk was busy so I was the one who initially talked to the BlackHawk Rep – I learned something on that call but that is not the topic of this post so I would skip it. Anyway, the rep told me all 3 cards were NOT found in BlackHawk system, and there was NO MONEY sent from that particular Lowes store to BlackHawk system. In other words, the money still sits at the Lowes system.
After the CS manager was able to talk to BlackHawk rep, she finished the call and went ahead to process a refund. My guess is, the Corporate Help Desk must have told her to do whatever BlackHawk told her to do…
Now, on these 3 not-activated cards due to system errors, there were lots of crazy in and out of entries in My Savings. One AMEX card that had bought 1 Gebit, no longer has the Lowes offer attached in My Offers. So I do not know if my subsequent buy made 2 days ago would ever generate the last statement credit which should be $20.49.
The other AMEX card that had bought 2 Gebits still has the Lowes Offer attached. Hopefully the statement credit of $38.51 would post (the remaining bal from the $100).
Neither the above 2 transactions made on Saturday has had the congrat email though.
BTW, the refund is just the SAME item number, i.e. whatever “flavor” of the Gebit you purchase. It does NOT matter because the refund is NOT card specific, just ITEM number specific. All Everywhere Grocery shown in your picture, have the SAME ITEM Number.
What “Cheryl” thought, was INCORRECT. Though eventually she got the job done. You do NOT NEED the specific card to perform the refund
What is needed is to IDENTIFY which Gebits that failed to activate – that again is very easy to identify when the cashier saw one card was not activated on her screen as you described – it is the UPC code above the Bar Code, – EACH Gebit has a UNIQUE UPC code. You can also do it by elimination – match each activation slip with the UPC code of your Gebits, and then the one is not activated is the one does not have a matching activation slip. This is how my CS manager has done it. She has the cashier read her the activation slip last 4 digits and then she found the matching Gebit which is activated, and found the 2 non-activated cards this way.
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What is the velocity limit? And how long till it clears?