It’s been a tough year for manufacturing starting with the FreeBird being taken away. The twists and turns of MS can be found in my most popular post, I’m In Manufacturing, Spending. With all these ups and downs, this Election season I pledge to build a great firewall for those that give away a million secrets like the boy who cried Vanilla Reload one too many times.
Today, I discovered more bad news. Giftcards.com, the site that used to charge $999 for $1000 worth of gift cards not only has eliminated free shipping but also has eliminated USPS shipping for $1.99. The only shipping they offer now is USPS Delivery Confirmation for $7.45. This means that the price of a $1000 order jumps up to $1015.29. In a matter of months $1000 of gift cards went from free to a $7 charge, to the current price gouge of $15.
Our trusty chocolate alternative to these cards goes for $5.95 for $500 though it is only loadable on the Bird not Swerve. Unless free shipping comes back or at least a discount, I won’t be ordering anymore gifts from this retailer. I guess you could order more than 1k to offset the shipping cost but in my experience those orders don’t get approved.
For those whose Target’s require a gift card with a name or for those that use Swerve, I don’t know what the solution is. One thing is clear, the war on MS is in high gear so like Andy Dufresne said, “Get busy loading or better get busy dying.”
How much more can we take?
the online ordering of gift cards remains valuable to me for 1)discover it miles 1st year 2)quickly meeting min spend on a new cc without worries about fraud alerts. However, competition for point two is to use a fee free code for AGC and my existing shipping plan to get a 2k AGC for no fee and no shipping and then use that locally to buy vanillas to load to red bird. The down side with that is the time it takes to travel to the different locations (some walgreens limit me to one! vvgc). Thus, sometimes I willing to accept a bit higher fee by ordering online.
I never got into the AGC because I have enough drama being 100 miles away from a Target to just through that extra hoop to save a few dollars/turn a profit. Now I may consider it because these shipping fees and transaction fees are starting to add up especially when this is what I’m facing these days: http://thepointsoflife.boardingarea.com/insomnia-from-minimum-spends/
[…] up from $4.95 to $6.95. Now it seems that one other change has been added. As The Points of Life points out, you can no longer get first class shipping for $1.99 per […]
I’ve been able to order $2465.25 worth of giftcards.com cards several times recently. 4 x 500, 1 x 465.25 (the last one to bring the subtotal under 2500 with fees and shipping, before my loyalty points get deducted). The site doesn’t like orders that exceed 2499.99 but has been happy to process several for just below that 🙂 I’m getting as much value out of that $7.45 as I can!
They are jackasses lol. But I like your determination. I think I’ll have to accept it just like I’ve accepted paying for vanillas now are more than the reloads were. Thanks for the comment.