Krogers had a sign up for the last 6 weeks that you could buy up to $2000 at register and had to go to desk for more. So I bought 4k at desk last week, slowed me down a bit but no biggie. This week I get blindsided at desk by a manager and shown a memo that states: all gift card purchases over $2000 (Including fees) have to be in cash!!
The registers are supposed to be hard coded soon to prevent going over (I'm guessing it will be associated with your DL # which they enter on any purchase over 1000 now) It showed the fixed and variable load visa/mc cards as well as amex, green dot and some others as examples. a helpful desk lady said it came out 6 weeks ago but not everyone had been trained. It had to do with a federal law that started in Feb (I believe this has to do with reporting transactions over 10k, like banks do, as a 10k limit was also discussed) The memo also quoted fraud prevention as a reason. She said their store had been fined already, a couple of times, for not having trained on it by now. Then to add insult to injury the jerk wouldn't let my wife buy a few cards, in a separate transaction, with her credit card....because:" I know you are together" you can come back tomorrow and get more.......grrrrr...so the hoops are getting smaller, and more trips to Kroger are needed because some mentally challenged corporate policy maker decided to write a memo and set up a policy that will not stop anyone from buying tons of gift cards, just force them to do it more slowly. It won't protect Kroger from fraud (the cashiers are supposed to check id and card info on all transactions)....and probably doesn't have anything to do with some law. They didn't even exclude the fees in the limit, which further limits your purchasing options... I will be following up with corporate, breaking the don't call rule, to find out what law the lady was talking about and she also mentioned they might be able to help in setting up monthly bulk purchase orders of giftcards. I should just take my 100K+ a year in giftcards and groceries purchases to Wal-mart or Target, which code as grocery, and save a trip to load RB or BB...the 5% off RB gives almost makes them competitive with the other 2 on food prices.