Originally Posted by teammjs

if anyone is desperate to spend the $1000 on multiple household cards, here is an option.

i went to Walgreens and bought 3 $300 Visa gift cards for about $15 total in activation fees. our daycare takes Visa (but not Amex), so i used them to pay some tuition without any problem.
yeah, $15 is more than i wanted to pay. however, consider that if you have just a 1% extra cash/point bonus on your normal grocery spend credit card for supermarket purchases, you're already sacrificing $10 rewards/$1000 in using the Starwoods card at the grocery store anyway, so effectively it doesn't really cost more than about $5 to go my route and quickly use these at places that don't take Amex.