According to this post on FlyerTalk, the grocery store Meijer [store locator] is now stocking both $200 Visa & American Express pre-paid cards with a fee of $6.95. This is interesting because Meijer registers are not hard coded to disallow their own gift cards to be used to purchase Visa/American Express gift cards. Obviously your mileage may vary when you try to do this, as it depends on the cashier if they’ll allow it. Fortunately Meijer has self check out lanes, which means you can do the transaction yourself.
Meijer also gives you a discount on their gift cards if you buy in bulk. This discount is up to 4% (up to 3% if using a credit card to purchase them). When you make a purchase online from Meijer.com it should also code as a grocery store purchase meaning you can earn up to 6% cash back by using a rewards earning credit card that has a high category bonus for grocery stores.
You might also be able to get additional cash back by using a cash back portal. You used to be able to get 10% cash back through ShopDiscover but they no longer offer this. According to FrequentMiler Labatory you needed to have non-gift card items in your cart to get cash back on the whole order. I haven’t heard of the majority of the cash back portals that offer something for Meijer, so use at your own risk. The ones I have heard of I’ve put at the top:
- Choice hotels: 2 points per $1 spent
- Hawaiian Airlines: 1.5 points per $1 spent
- View the rest of your options at cashbackholic, up to 9% cash back
Here’s how to maximize your profits
- Purchase Meijer gift cards from Meijer.com, you can get up to a 3% discount
- Use a rewards portal if possible
- Use a rewards earning credit card (e.g American Express Blue Cash Preferred which is up to 6%)
- Go into Meijer and purchase $200 Visa gift cards (these are easier to unload than American Express gift cards), these have a $6.95 fee
- Unload your Visa gift cards with one of the many different methods (e.g Amazon Payments, Evolve Money, Serve/Bluebird etc).
The fees on the gift cards are basically 3.5%. This means you should make 4.5% + shopping portal bonus if you use a 6% cash back card. I personally don’t live in a state with any Meijer stores so I won’t be able to take advantage of this offer. If you do decide to take advantage of this offer here is some advice.
- Check to see if stores near you stock Visa/AmEx gift cards
- Start small to ensure registers aren’t hard coded
- Have multiple ways of unloading your gift cards in the event that one of them fails
This method has a lot of risk involved. You don’t want to be stuck with a heap of Meijer gift cards you can’t unload so do this at your own risk. You can find out more ways to unload gift cards by reading through our manufactured spending archives.
