Here’s How to get up to $77 Discount off GAS

So here in the Suburbs of Washington DC, one of the main supermarket chains is Giant Food.  Giant is actually not my preferred Grocery store,  but they happen to be running a very lucrative promotion right now.  The are giving you 5 Gas points for each dollar your spend on American Express Gift Cards through May 22

So this past Saturday, I walked into my local Giant and purchased a $500 American Express gift Card.  The Gift card actually costs $505.95 due to the processing fee from American Express.

With the 5X gas point promotion I was expecting to earn 25000 Gas points.  These points are worth $2.50 off my next Fill-up at a participating Shell Gas Station, although you can use at most $2.20 on up to 35 gallons of gas.  That can add up to a discount of up $77.   Plus, since I paid with a credit card I also get 500 frequent flier miles for the grocery purchase.

Disappointed! 

As I left the store I checked my receipt and felt a bit of disappointment.  Although I was expecting over 2500 Gas Points from this promotion, I only saw points from the other grocery items I purchased.

As soon as I got back home and checked the internet forums and realized that many of the Giant stores had not loaded this promotion into their systems.  On Sunday I went back to store and asked the store manager to credit me the missing points.  I again left the store disappointed as the store manager was not able to credit more than 500 points.  She suggested I call the customer service the next day.  Reading the internet forums others had gotten the store managers to credit 500 points on five separate transactions,  but this manager didn’t feel comfortable with that.  On Monday,  I did call customer service and got through to a friendly agent who looked-up my receipt on his computer and credited me all my Gas Points.  Later that day I went to my local Shell Gas Station with two cars and proceeded to very happily fill-up 35 Gallons of gas at the whopping price of $1.49 a gallon. (I was Filling Gas like it was 1990 again)

So after a lot more trouble than I was expecting I did get a pretty good deal on gas.

Liquidating American Express Gift Cards

What do I do with a $500 American Express Giftcard?  Well I could just spend it as I would other credit cards.  This is the obvious thing to do. But I would much rather use other Credit Cards that earn points instead of this gift card.  Instead I used Amazon Payments.  This is a service like Paypal.  You can use it sent money to a friend or relative.  In this case I am going to send $500 using the gift card to my Dad.  He can then deposit this into his bank account and pay me back later.  Here is a great blog post about this very easy way to liquidate $1000 in gift cards each month.

Please Try this for yourself but YMMV!

So this is a pretty lucrative deal  (Ends May 22) if you happen to live near a Giant or Stop and Shop Grocery Store.  This thread on flyertalk,  mentions that most stores have updated their systems for this promotion so you should get your bonus point without much hassle.   I am actually going to buy another gift card later this week.  I Hope you do the same and get these Big Gas Savings.

 

-TK