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Contents
The Offer
- American Express is offering a discount of 40% when you use Membership Rewards points for ‘at home essentials’.
Our Verdict
Absolute best case scenario seems to be about 1¢ per point, this goes to show how bad redeeming points for items normally is. It’s a shame American Express isn’t offering increasing value when competitor Chase is with the ‘Pay Yourself Back’ promotion.
It’s a better deal to just redeem the points for gift cards and then go out and buy the stuff.
To you and me, it makes no sense.. But Amazon and Amex/Discover/Citi and other retailers did invest in ‘Pay with points at checkout’ at various retailers just because they had extra cash lying around. I have seen enough people excited to buy things ‘for free’ or get a ‘80% discount’. But that is to the uninitiated. If you are reading DoC, you know DoC’s verdict before even scrolling down. This ‘offer’ is not for you.
I’m fine with this – more people who don’t know any better will cash out via low value routes, which helps subsidize the higher value options for the rest of us!
We can’t have our cake and eat it too
Please no politics
Let them eat cake
OT: Do they only clawback airline reimbursement on MR cards?
They keep it that way probably because many people still redeem their MR that way. I have friend he has tons of spending and MR pointS and he redeemed it for a TV and told me how he was so excited when It is the reward from his spending. I told him with that same a amount of points, he could book a flight ticket with 3x value.
Can’t deny that the majority of consumers are *dumb* like ur friend. I guess we are just those 1% (or even less) who use the points wisely.
but it’s a flat screen!
Yeah but maybe he wants to watch TV right now and not fly five hours with a mask on, no matter what the flight’s “value” is. If you want to buy stuff with your points, just get the Schwab platinum, cash them out for 1.25c per, and then buy it with your card and get more points plus purchase protection.
Agree, minus that everyone has enough points to make getting the schwab plat worth it. The people who are cashing in points for a TV are either not heavy hitters with piles of points.
Yeah, and the prices of things on ‘sale’ are based on MSRP which is usually more expensive than what you can find at the Amazons of the world.
To be fare there’s no chase schwab