Correct Rules for Loading Serve at Family Dollar & Dollar General

Because manufactured spending is an empirical and local process, incorrect information often pops up about certain methods. Though American Express is selling its prepaid portfolio to Incomm, likely in the next quarter, I’d like to correct some widespread misinformation about the rules for loading Serve cards at Family Dollar (FD)/Dollar General (DG), and discuss a recent change in my area that caused me a bit of headache!

Keep in mind that rules may differ by locality, though I have no reason to believe that is the case here.

Contents

1 Mechanics: A Curiosity
2 The Rules
3 Invalid Merchant
4 Concluding Thoughts

Mechanics: A Curiosity

This has nothing to do with the rules of loading, but the mechanics of loading at FD/DG is a logical starting point because it contains some information that will be useful later.

At both FD and DG, the cashier initiates the Serve load process by scanning a barcode located on the back of a small yellow card. The transaction screen will then briefly pop up “Vanilla Reload Network”.

At FD, proceeding with the load requires supervisor permissions. You swipe your Serve card at the POS terminal, the cashier enters the load amount, and you use a debit card at the POS terminal to load.

At DG, the cashier enters the load amount, swipes your Serve card on their keyboard, and you use a debit card at the POS terminal to load.

The Rules

Let us define a transaction as the initiation of the Serve load process by the cashier through the completion of your payment.

You can load up to $500 in a single transaction. (This is a commonly quoted limit online, and I have never attempted to exceed it by splitting payment.)

Many articles and posts state there is a $500 limit to the amount anyone can load at a given FD location (sometimes it is left ambiguous whether it is FD and DG or just FD), with the first person to visit the store that day being the lucky one who can load their card.

While this may vary by area, neither FD nor DG have limits on the number of times you or anyone can load at one store. I have personally loaded $500 three separate times at an FD in a day, and often load $500 twice in consecutive transactions at FD & DG. Other people I’ve spoken to across the country have likewise had success loading more than $500 at one store. Assuming you are at a supervisor’s register, this is much easier at FD because you don’t have to pass your Serve to the cashier to swipe. Being polite and having a good relationship with cashiers is important if you want to load more than once in a row, and loading more than twice in a row has always struck me as far too much.

Other, very variable, rules that you may run into include stores only accepting prepaid debit cards on the InComm network (Vanilla-branded; see below), or stores only accepting cash.

Invalid Merchant

Between the morning and evening of October 30, 2017, the back end for Serve loading at my nearest DG was updated. Poorly. After using a debit card at the POS terminal, the system processed the transaction and took the funds from my debit card before spitting out an invalid merchant error. At this point, the system instructed the cashier that I was entitled to a full refund.

I encountered the same problem at the first (and only) FD I tried, but their system spit out an invalid merchant error as soon as I used a debit card, so no payment was processed.

I could only find a few mentions of an invalid merchant error online, so it appears I am one of the few to run into this. See [1] [2] [3] at Flyertalk. This error can also occur when you’ve hit your monthly load limit.

After some pondering, I went back and tried a Vanilla-branded debit card, which solved my issues. My assumption is that this error ties back to the “Vanilla Reload Network” notification that pops up briefly when starting a Serve load at FD or DG. The system that processes Serve loads, at least at stores in my area, has been updated to enforce the requirement that prepaid cards be on the InComm network in order to be used for Serve loads.