Monday Morning Miles Talk: Kroger Gift Card Deal Results

Monday Morning Miles Talk is a regular series that has some smaller, more quirky ideas to kick off the work week.  These are essentially random ideas that I wanted to share with you.  Here are the previous entries.

• How To Maximize Your Flexible Spending Account
• Increase Spend For American Express Sign Up Bonuses
• Mining For Lost Rewards
• How I did Selling Those Kohl’s Personal Appliances
• Reselling Apple Airpods at the End of Their Life Cycle
• Unexpected Ways I Have Earned Points
• Can You go to Disney for Free?
• Why I Love Those Best Buy Gift Card Deals
• My love hate relationship with the Google Express offer

Kroger Gift Card Sale Results and Lessons Learned

Kroger, and it’s subsidiaries, kicked off a gift card deal last week.  It was one of the better deals I have seen from them.  The deal is still ongoing but a lot of the better offers have already reached their maximum amount of loads.  I finished up with the deal this weekend and wanted to discuss my results and a lesson I learned.

Details on the Deal

Kroger had a list of coupons you could load to your card to get discounts on gift cards purchased at their stores.  They also had an offer for 4x fuel points once you loaded it to your shoppers reward account.  Most of these deals were break even but that allowed you to get 4x fuel points, as well as, grocery bonused spend. Kroger usually does these types of deals once or twice a year and I always look forward to it.  It is a good way to rack up some free spend and some free gas, or to heavily discount your holiday shopping.

My Results

I know there are many out there that hit this deal much harder then I did but I will go over my results for anyone that missed out. When the offer first came out you had to go through the link in DDG’s article to load the deals.  It was not on the main Kroger coupon website for some reason.  I had 3 Kroger accounts already set up that I had access to.  I was in a rush the first day and only loaded up the offers to two of the accounts.  By the next day some of the better offers were gone, Best Buy and eBay.

I also wanted to focus on cash back since I have been lacking in cash back spend this year.  I used my American Express Blue Cash Everyday card to get 3% cash back on my purchase.  Of course I recently downgraded to it from the Preferred version and missed out on the 6% return for grocery spend, such is life.

For more info on either of these cards and other cash back cards click here!

I ended up spending $1,015 on gift cards at Kroger.  There were a few I kept for personal use. I sold all but $75 of that $1,065 at cost or for a small profit. The face value on the $1,015 in gift cards was $1,255, a discount of 19%. The most profitable offers were the Home Depot and Best Buy cards.

The Figures

I spent $940 on gift cards that I was looking to resell.  For that purchase I earned $28.20 in cash back from American Express.  If you have a Blue Cash Preferred it would have been double that.

I also earned 3,760 worth of fuel points for the purchases.  You get $1 off per gallon for every 1,000 fuel points.  For simplicity sake let’s call it $3.70 off per gallon.  Most fill ups are for around 15 gallons bringing me a savings of $55.50.  The offer is good for up to 35 gallons so if you are able to get two cars at the gas station at the same time then you can more than double that return.

Selling the gift cards brought me a cash return of $967.20, a profit of $27.20.

Here is a chart with all of the numbers:

Lessons Learned

There were a few things I would have done differently.  I would have loaded up all of my available accounts at the same time to ensure I was able to get all of the best deals.  I plan on making more accounts available to me now in order to be ready for next time.  By the time I could have gotten other accounts lined up it was too late to get the best offers.

Conclusion

This was a great offer that you could really max out to the limit if you wanted to.  It was fairly easy too, with a decent return.  If you had a store with a friendly self check out area then it only took one trip to the store to knock it out!

I do wish I had been more prepared in order to take full advantage of the offer.  I will be enjoying my severely discounted gas over the next few weeks though!

Did you get in on this offer?  How much did you end up spending on gift cards?  Did you use them for personal use of for reselling?  Let me know in the comments section!

Disclosure: Miles to Memories has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Miles to Memories and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.

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