Kroger $5 Off Deal
Kroger and presumably its subsidiaries (this is confirmed to work at Smith’s) are offering $5 off the purchase of 2 Visa or Mastercard gift cards totaling $50 or more. The savings is loaded to your loyalty card via a digital coupon on their website. Lets take a look at the details and how to maximize the promotion.
The Deal
Save $5.00 when you buy TWO (2) or more MasterCard or Visa Gift Cards totaling $50.00 or more.
How to Load
To load the deal:
- Login to your Kroger (or subsidiary) loyalty card account
- Go to “Savings” and then “Digital Coupon”
- Sort the results by “Value”
- Locate the offer and click “Load to Card”
Terms
Analysis
What is interesting about these terms is that they don’t exclude variable load gift cards. This means that you could presumably purchase 2 x $500 gift cards to maximize your spend. Variable load cards carry the same $5.95 fee as $100 gift cards.
The best use of a deal like this is with cards that earn either 5x or 5% cashback at grocery stores. With that said, this would work great with the AAdvantage 3x offer I wrote about this morning and even a 2% cashback card will come out ahead.
With the $5 discount, your cost per card is $3.45 or about 7/10 of 1 percent. With a 2% card for example you would earn a $13.24 profit for the purchase of 2 x $500 cards. No matter how you slice this up, it is a great deal.
Conclusion
It is nice to see deals like this come along. While it is not a negative cost deal like we see from time to time, the discount is instant and it seems that you can get the discount once per day which is nice. I will probably use this deal to easily earn a few AAdvantage miles due to my Executive card offer. How about you?
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Just sign up for a new bogus Kroger rewardscard and hit multiple stores. Then you can scale this offer up multiple times limited only on your available credit limit.
Also ran into static when trying to buy a money order with the gift card at Kroger. Went over to Walmart instead.
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YMMV.
Despite spending hundreds of dollars at my Kroger in the Mid-Atlantic region, I did not have the $5 discount for Visa/Mastercard purchases as a coupon option. 🙁
And I checked my coupons on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
This is a targeted offer, and not nationwide for Kroger.
Can this coupon be used multiple times?
Based on the terms it would seem that it can be used once per day.
Limit one use per digital coupon according to the sites (QFC and Fred Meyer). The coupon goes away from the coupon list after use,
Yeah it seems the terms were incorrect at first and perhaps they have changed them. Based on people’s experiences it does seem to be a one-time use coupon unfortunately.
” With a 2% card for example you would earn a $13.24 profit for the purchase of 2 x $500 cards.”
Not really. You need to factor in opportunity cost. If you assume 2% as the benchmark for opportunity cost you only earn a profit of $5. Furthermore, if you can obtain $500 GCs cheaper than 5.95 your profit is less than $5.
I don’t quite look at it that way. While your math is correct, you are saying the profit is $5, but everyone already knows that since the discount is $5. Yes you get $5 more than if you were to purchase the cards without the coupon, so if you want to look at that $5 discount as your profit then go ahead, but that isn’t quite how I see it.
The honest way I look at it is that with this deal you can manufacture spend for $3.45 per $500 card which is cheaper than anywhere else when it comes to buying Visa/MC gift cards and the fact that it is at a grocery store opens up a lot of possibilities with category bonuses.
With that said, I totally understand your perspective and think it is valid. Thanks for your input and giving everyone another way to look at things!
How did you arrive at your profit number? Liquidation isn’t free. I doubt you would liquidate all my GCs for me at 0% would you? At what cost would you do it? There is also carry risk (much more so with US Bank GCs which are prone to fraud if not liquidated immediately). I’m not saying 2% is the right or wrong number to use for the accounting, but I do think it’s more reasonable than 0%.
Thanks for sharing.
If I remember correctly, Kroger had similar deal last year for 5$ coupon after 2 visa/master cards purchase. But at that time, no loyalty card was required, which means everyone could make use of this deal for multiple times. Even better, it had been found that one would get the 5$ coupon even if she/he just bought 1 card. I guess Kroger becomes smarter now. Now it requires loyalty card……
Can these gift cards be loaded into Serve/ BB using Walmart kiosks?
Yes the Visa work well at either Walmart registers or the kiosks. The Mastercards work great at the kiosks, but if you use them at a register then you must quickly hit cancel to change the payment type from credit to debit. It is best to try to stick with the Visas if at all possible.
My Kroger store only sells the variable load Visa cards issued by U.S. Bank, and those do NOT work at WalMart with BB/Serve. Only the MetaBank-issued Visa cards work anymore.
I don’t know where you heard that, but U.S. Bank issued cards absolutely still work at Walmart. I just loaded $1k worth yesterday. The Mastercards require you to cancel and change method of payment when paying at the register, but work fine at the kiosks. The Visas work fine at both.
Did you read this somewhere or have you been running into issues at your local Walmart?
Hi Shawn. I’ve long loaded the $200 visa debit cards purchased from Staples and loaded them to BlueBird at Wmt registers, maybe 4 a month. (though lately, I’ve been restricted to no more than 3 at a time)
More recently, I was following your guidance to try the $100 fixed value Visa (not m/c) debit cards bought at Kroger — but I tried to load via money center at Wmt, they don’t work.
Am I missing a step? Do I need to register them on-line first to get a new pin?