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Staples has a new Visa gift card deal in-store this week that wasn’t advertised in their weekly ad. With this deal, you’ll save $5 instantly when buying a $200 Visa gift card.
The Deal
- Get $5 off when buying a $200 Visa gift card.
Key Terms
- Expires April 13, 2019.
- Limit 1 per household.
Quick Thoughts
The terms of this offer are a little confusing. The sign says it’s $5 off, but the text next to it says ‘No purchase fee’. The purchase fee is $6.95, so that means it’s either $6.95 off or you’ll pay a $1.95 activation fee – I suspect it’s the latter.
While that means it’s not a break even deal initially, it can be profitable with the right card. With a Chase Ink Plus or Ink Cash card, you’d earn 1,010 Ultimate Rewards or $10.10 per card. Alternatively, take advantage of the Staples Amex Offer to save an additional 10%, thereby reducing the cost of a $200 card to $181.76.
The limit of 1 is disappointing as it makes it more work to scale unless you have a friendly cashier who’s willing to sell you more than one per visit. Depending on how the offer’s coded into their system, you might need to pay for them in separate transactions in order to get the $5 discount multiple times.
The reader who sent in the photo saw this deal in Chicago. There’s a chance that it’s only a local offer, but hopefully it’s available nationwide.
h/t reader Carol
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I got this deal today in Grand Rapids, MI.
wish bb & serve were to lift the ban so can re-acquire multiple cards; the gobank acct changes its terms often for the worse & loading is limited
[…] isn’t the only office supply store running an unadvertised gift card deal this week. Office Depot/Office Max is offering a $10 instant discount when spending $100 or more on […]
Just happen to be right outside of Staples when I saw this email notification, confirmed the discount is $5 for $200 VGC.
So still a net activation cost of $1.95?
Yes.
Thanks for confirming 🙂
no $500 cards at staples as far as i know. $200 card:1010 UR with INK, 181.75 cost with AMEX.
You’re right – not sure why I had $500 cards on my mind. I’ll update the math.
If there was an easy, inexpensive way to get rid of $200 Visa gift cards, this would obviously be a great deal. But the obvious method — buying money orders with them — isn’t so easy with these small denominations. You’re probably going to look pretty sketchy to most cashiers if you take a stack of them into the store to liquidate. So at a $2 fee, is it worth it? I’m not sure. I guess it depends on your individual circumstances.
Just know there is a way and it doesn’t cost anything extra.
Cracker Barrel?
Well, that’s not very helpful, is it?
gc.bb.ca1.card paid with. full cycle.
ca1?
Checking account 1 at bank 2.
Why not bill pay directly from bb? Seems like both approaches will lead to shutdown eventually. So you think you’ll avoid shutdown longer by transferring from bb to another bank account versus just bill paying directly from bb? Also, I haven’t heard of any mass shutdowns since incomm bought the prepaid business from Amex about 1 year ago. So in the absence of recent data points on shutdowns, why not just do things the simplest way?
I don’t MS huge amounts just enough to hit MSR and when there’s promos at OSS. Making huge payments in random numbers from a pre paid card looks more suspect (to me) than with drawing to a credit union ca I can throw away or change if I need to. Besides withdrawing money to a ca was a feature intended for bb.
PS just bought multiple gc from staples, discount applied to each card. Purchases at 2:21 pst, by 2:51 pst its being sent to my checking account.
Seems like a sure fire way to get your BB account shut down lickety split. Have you done this frequently?
Bluebird? Or something else?
That’s part of it. And I’ll add a certain grocery store will let you add up to 4x 200 cards at one time.
I’ve swiped 5 $200s at grocery stores to buy two $500 MOs. But it looks sketchy as hell and isn’t likely to be a pleasant transaction or particularly scale-able. I note that some of the liquidation techniques described above seem to involve Bluebird, which to my knowledge is still impossible (?) to get for most readers. And you’re still looking at that $1.95 cost in this week’s promo. Unless you can remove that cost or devise a truly convenient way to liquidate these cards, the offer remains marginal to me.
Hmm. There’s a lot to unpack.
1. Multiple people have said they believe I’ll be shut down but mike says since the pre paid business has been purchased from Amex he hasn’t seen any reports of shut downs, so isn’t that counter intuitive logic?
2. Everything we do here is measured in convenience and opportunity cost right? I live literally two minutes from a WMNM. I’ve found with different cashiers loading $600 at a time (3 cards) or ($1000 w 2 cards) is the across the board amounts that don’t seem to time consuming or weird looking from their perspective. I’ve even had someone in customer service tell me they load these $200 cards in multiples to people’s bb at my Walmart all the time so they seem unbothered when I come to do it. I’ve also made a point to try and go to the same two or three cashiers that know what I’m doing and expect it. At $600 a day that’s 18k a month (an amount I’ll never do, again Im small scale and do this only during promos and for MSR).
The second part you mentioned about it being 1.95 per card to me is negligible, sure I’m supposed to aim for negative cost or break even (like staples online gc purchases) but then you have to wait for them and their codes to be sent to you. Again convenience. Like I mentioned yesterday I can buy these and unload them to my checking account within 30 minutes and never have to touch the gc cards again. That’s piece of mind. And since I’m mostly aiming for Hyatt stays with my UR we’re talking about $10 for a cat 1 or $60 for a cat 7, both prices I would quickly pay for any quality hotel. Sure we want everything for free but I’ve always wanted to travel more than anything else so I’m willing to pay because I just see this as a way to afford what I was going to do anyway at a great discount.
3. I’m also unaware as to why it would be impossible to get a bb as I’ve had mine for at least 3-4 years. When people were getting shut down I was in debt and was not MS’ing which may have saved my account. Idk what scale your MS’ing but I tend to think anyone that got shut down deserves it, I mean hogs get slaughtered is the saying right. Seems like it makes it more likely to survive as they’ve already purged the huge majority of people running a lot of money through bb.
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Can these be loaded on to a bluebird card? (Are they issued by metabank?)
Yes and yes.