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AMEX Twitter Sync

Purchase an American Express $25 Gift Card for $15 via Twitter Sync

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AMEX Twitter Sync

[Expired] I became a big fan of the American Express Sync Facebook program late last year, specifically around the holidays when everyone was clambering for our business. As a result, I scored a great deal on a discounted Costco membership purchase, as well as several other offers.

Now, American Express is linked up with exclusive offers via Twitter. As a result, there is a great offer to get a $25 American Express gift card for $15 shipped.

If you want to get in on this offer, stick with us on the instructions, as they can be a tad bit confusing.

1) Tweet #BuyAmexGiftCard25 to get started. You’ll be prompted by @AmexSync to sync your Card for purchases, if you have not already.

2) Look for a response from @AmexSync with the confirmation #hashtag. Tweet this #hashtag within 15 minutes of the response from @AmexSync to confirm your purchase.

3) Once your purchase is confirmed, your product will be shipped via free 2-day shipping.

The provided gift card comes with no fees, and even if you lose the card, they will refund you the remaining balance.

This promotion is extremely limited quantities and is set to expire by March 3, 2013. However, I do not anticipate the offer lasting that long.

If for any reason you want to unsync your card later, just follow the instructions on the American Express site.

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AMEX Blue Cash Preferred

Giant Eagle Discontinued FoodPerks Program & How That Impacts You

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What happens when you take the perfect combination of grocery purchases and fuel purchases, pair them with a circular reward program, double coupons, and then are able to maximize the reward program on your credit card? You get the Giant Eagle grocery store chain.

Giant Eagle is definitely not the cheapest guy in the market for gasoline or food purchases. However, once you learn to maximize the reward program, staying loyal to the brand pays itself back in dividends and convenience, breeding loyalty from the consumer.

Giant Eagle FoodPerks Discontinued

Giant Eagle (GE) is a regional grocery chain servicing the Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland districts. In addition, GE offers gasoline via their GetGo stations. Introduced a few years ago, GE offers both a FuelPerks and FoodPerks reward program to the customers. The business model acted circular in that your gasoline purchases “fueled” your grocery discounts and your grocery purchases earned discounts off of gas. It was a smart planned that spurred loyalty in a tough and competitive grocery market.

Our family learned to exclusively fill up two vehicles at the various GetGo stations in the district. For every 10 gallons of gasoline we purchased, we would earn 1% back on food purchases. The percentage continued to build up in your account, and expired 2 months after the last day of the month they were earned.

Likewise, for every $50 spent at Giant Eagle locations, you earned $0.10 off per gallon of gasoline. So spending at one or the other always created a discount to use at the opposite. We used the program mostly for the benefit of discounted grocery purchases, and whatever discount we earned on gas was a bonus.

The great thing about purchases at Giant Eagle was that gift cards were allowed to earn rewards, and GE stocked practically every gift card imaginable. So if you had a gift of $50 and purchased a gift card for someone, you could also earn FuelPerks in addition to any benefits of purchasing with your selected credit card. With some creativity, you can start to see some of the benefits.

However, there were some downsides to the promotion.

1) Discounts had to be used in their entirety. So if you have $1.00 off per gallon saved up in FuelPerks, you had to apply the entire discount to your selected purchase and could not break it up into two transactions. The same thing went for FoodPerks. Where that became a problem was rewards earned in a month that were about to expire also caused you to use up any rewards that were recently earned.

2) While one could earn unlimited FoodPerks on your account, you could only redeem 20% on up to $300 in purchases. So if one purchased $400 in groceries, only the first $300 would be eligible for the 20% max discount.

So our family tended to have a pretty well oiled machine when it came to gas and grocery purchases. We only shopped for groceries at GE when our FoodPerks reached 20%, and only tended to buy stuff that was on sale and had double coupons. We could typically take a $400 grocery purchase and get it down to under $300 after applying double coupons first, and then FoodPerks discounts. Then we could usually earn around 5% off by using our credit card (or 6% if you had the American Express Blue Cash Preferred card).

For Giant Eagle, the combination of programs meant maximum savings for our family and low margins for them. However, GE also made a premium on us for gas purchases as well as the occasional splurge item. In addition, we were probably the exception rather than the rule for maximum savings.

However, this week our long-term game plan came with a drastic change. Via a friend, Giant Eagle grocery stores will be eliminating the FoodPerks program in its entirety on February 13, 2013.

So why do I bring any of this up? This offer is mostly regional and does not impact the overwhelming majority of our audience. However, what this represents is a classic example of having to constantly reevaluate how not only our family spends on groceries and gas, but also our spending habits and credit card spend.

With this change in the Giant Eagle rewards program, we have zero reason to ever purchase gas at their stations again, and therefore, we have no need to buy their groceries. Since GE prices are typically substantially higher, we can now continue to focus on buying in bulk at Costco, or some other local grocers.

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Merchant Fees on Credit Cards About to Change the Way We Earn Rewards

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This past weekend an important piece of regulation went into effect that impacts everyone that uses a credit card. As of this past Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013, merchants who accept Visa and MasterCard will be allowed to add a service charge to the purchase price. Based on a lawsuit brought by retailers, merchants are now allowed to charge you a fee up to 4% on your purchases to recoup the fees they pay to the card issuers. In the past Visa and MasterCard restricted retailers from charging an additional fee to use a credit card, causing the merchants to build the card costs into their business model. Now things are about to change.

The question remains which retailers will follow through with passing along the fees, but there are new rules that appear to limit their implementation. For starters, select states ban credit card surcharges: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma and Texas. This presents good news for shoppers at national retailers. Visa and MasterCard’s rules do not permit varying credit card policies, which means if Target has a store in California, and does not charge card surcharges, they can not in other states.

In addition, card issuer policies state that if merchants elect to charge a fee for using a Visa or MasterCard, they also have to charge a fee with American Express and Discover cards. The good news here is that AMEX and Discover do not allow merchant fees on their cards, so again, retailers will not be allowed to charge a card premium.

What I would expect to start to see is merchants may start to regress in their acceptance of AMEX and Discover card. If a merchant could add 4% to the bottom line, by accepting only Visa and MasterCard, it seems to be a simple solution to stop accepting AMEX and Discover, especially when their fees can be higher.

If merchants start no longer accepting AMEX and Discover, that makes a major blow to those issuers, who have worked extremely hard over the past years to get more places to accept them (i.e. Small Business Saturday).

Some of the additional things that merchants can now control include requiring a $10 minimum on credit card purchases; a discount for paying with cash, check or PIN debit or for using a specific network-branded card; and discounts for paying with non-rewards cards versus rewards cards.

A common thing that has been going around for months is people purchasing Vanilla Reload gift cards, and then transferring them to the AMEX BlueBird card to pay for expenses that may not normally be able to accept credit cards (i.e. mortgages). While most retailers have started to disallow credit cards on these gift card purchases, now with a minimum $10 purchase requirement, their use may be shut down completely. I never dove too much into actually using the Blue Bird card though (who has time with kids).

Want to avoid paying more at the register?

Debit cards are not subject to the transaction surcharges. Of course, neither is cash.

The bad news is that your favorite reward earning credit card now could end up costing you a significant amount to earn those miles or points. As an example, if a new credit card earns you 50,000 miles for making $3,000 in purchases, and merchants charge the full 4%, you could be paying $120 for those miles. That assumes you only shop at locations that elect to charge the full fee, which clearly seems the impacts may be limited. In addition, even at $120 for 50,000 miles, it is still worth the cost, just an added cost consumers need to realize. This may have more of an impact on small town America with limited, and more local shopping resources.

To read some more detailed information on the new policy, head over to www.electronicpaymentscoalition.org/. While the policies are in place, they appear to only have preliminary approval and are still subject to final ruling, let alone possibly years of challenges to the settlement.

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