Posting my findings here (as referenced by Shel above) for posterity - here is the full post showing that "cash equivalents" are likely being enforced on VR purchases at CVS at the least:
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I started churning my BC card like mid-may. I went from having nothing on the card to churning about $7K by the end of the month and another $1500 or so at the beginning June.
As of this morning, my rewards tracking shows the $8500 is valid towards the category purchases and my dashboard is now reflecting the 5% Cash Back.
My Cash Back balance doesn't show any increase yet - but I suspect that it might take another cycle to get money earned from the last.
What I'm curious about is will they start counting 5% on *all* valid purchases after I met my $6,500 spend - or only starting on the cycle following?
If the latter, I will have lost out on about $1500 of purchases. Not the end of the world - but would be nice to get.
MORE IMPORTANTLY...
Something strange... It shows that I have a total of $8150.53 in spending with the following breakdown:
$2033.59 Grocery
$5058.78 Pharmacy
$1058.16 Everywhere else (i.e. ineligible)
When I look at my statement and deduct my only ineligible purchase (Costco) from the $1058.16 I get $1007.90.
My only charge for $1007.90 was for 2x$500 VR (+3.95 fee) at a CVS in Missouri.
The CVS is tagged properly as "Merchandise & Supplies - Pharmacies".
That was my *only* CVS purchase, and also my only *only* VR purchase that month.
This means 1 of 3 things:
1) CVS is exempt from everyday spending categories
2) VRs are exempt from everyday spending categories (which means AMEX is able to track them)
3) VRs at CVS are exempt from everyday spending categories (which also means AMEX can track them).
It is possible that this just missed getting tagged properly. I'm not sure if I should try to contact them because I don't want to bring my account under any review.
Hopefully this is just CVS and/or VRs and that standard GC purchases at Walgreens and supermarkets are not affected.
Worst case scenario this is just the beginning of AMEX tracking the charges by line-item and it is only a matter of time until they can exclude all.
Please post your findings.
UPDATE - here is a screen shot that shows the breakdown referenced above. It went from $0.00 balance to the numbers you see above a couple days after my May statement closed (May is the month I put all these charges on):
