It’s hard to believe that my final Target REDcard load was in Atlanta on May 1.
Last week I was in Atlanta for a few days to attend the Freddie Awards and a couple of other related events including the Delta Jet Drag.
I stopped by Target a couple of times to load my REDcard. The first time was to finish off my load for the month of April with the second time mentioned above.
My brother and I originally planned to stop by Target the morning of our flight home on May 2. This would’ve finished off the monthly load for May but we ended up getting rid of our rental car the night before so this never happened.
When I got home I was totally exhausted and saw no need to rush to Target to start loading the remaining $2,500 to my card. I figured there was a few weeks left to worry about that so why make any unnecessary extra trips.
Well go figure… just a few days after I got home the dreaded news started to circulate about a memo being sent to Target locations about credit cards no longer being allowed to load REDcard starting May 6.
I thought about stopping by Target later that day but didn’t feel it was really worth the trouble. Considering my local stores limit loads to $1,000 per day (and real work to take care of), I passed on the option to load my card with a credit card one last time.
I think I may have also been in denial.
When CVS stopped allowing Vanilla Reloads to be purchased with credit cards, it took some time for the changes to be implemented across all of the stores. I couldn’t imagine Target acting so quickly to make these changes happen but it happened!!!
So now I’m wondering what’s next???
I wouldn’t consider myself heavily involved in manufactured spend but these techniques and tricks are (obviously) a great way to hit the minimum spends required for credit card bonuses.
I dabbled a bit in purchasing $1 coins from the U.S. Mint a few years back which was equal parts fun and a pain to get rid of. I also had fun hunting down Vanilla Reloads & PayPal gift cards. For a while I bought gift cards at Staples to load to my BlueBird. However, that was always a pain since there are no Walmart stores close to home. Then the REDcard came along which was the easiest (besides Amazon Payments) and cheapest way to do manufactured spend, although with limits…
For now, I might start buying gift cards again at Staples to try to load to REDcard but I’m not so confident that the stores close to home will allow this.
Hopefully something new will soon come along to make up for the loss of Target REDcard.
What kind of manufactured spender are you?
Does anybody have any MS tricks up their sleeve that they’d like to share? 🙂
AlohaDaveKennedy- Well said!
Daniel- Yes and no.
Joey- Lucky you! Wish I had finished off the month’s load before heading home from ATL
Sean- It sure isn’t easy! Sounds like you have an interesting plan. I’m not confident that I’ll be able to load with GCs without my name on them at my local Target but I might try.
While a little more work, I’m going to keep going to Target to take advantage of the Vanilla unloading. I, thankfully, still have some gas stations where I can get $500 OVs. In my deck, I have a few cards that give 2x for that. Worst-case is I use my Ink, get 1000 points, burn 500 to offset the fee, and still bank just as many as I would have using that Ink at Target. For the slow-and-steady approach, this works. Not quite as good for the minimum spends reqs I might have coming up, but we didn’t get into this because it was easy, right?
It was like an MS reunion at target in NYC last Tuesday. Three people were in front of me — all doing reloads, and the manager was nice to let us load up to $2000 since it was the last day!
You got to have money (credit) to make money (miles). If you dont have it, dont play around in MS.
The latest fatally wounded opportunities are UFB Direct and Target . These are now the walking dead. There is another opportunity fatally wounded out there and word on the underground is another is on imminent death watch. Nothing is being passed to the blogs and FT because any notice would cause a surge and quicker death spiral.
Big data, mass distribution of tradecraft, fraudsters and haters (misguided AML folk) are aging opportunities beyond their years. Opportunities that lasted for over 10 years are being killed in days after mass publicity, surges and ill thought out company missives. Misguided AML folk are doing things like telling CSRs that declaring buying a money order with a gift card is illegal (it isn’t). Circles and arrows are causing folk to load up on things like AGCs only to get stuck carrying illiquid plastic.
Much of the leading edge of MS is now very risky and no place for newbies. Experienced folk are losing money and having significant amounts of funds put at risk or locked up for many months. The once bountiful lake MS is turning into the great dismal swamp.