Very interesting to everything said. I don't have my physical gold card yet and it's not showing up in my Amex online accounts yet, but I did get a splash page when logging into the Amex account mentioning the new gold benefits and to explore more about them, so things still seem to be on track! I'm also happy about the airline credit being calendar year and not card year! That's a nice little perk to go with the AF waived for the first year! I'll have to go research Alaska Air's track rate with getting refunded for certain value gift cards :P
Delta has been working great on my Platinum, but I usually find myself needing to take at least one AS flight (that's $80 to $120) every year so splitting the benefits might be nice.
I don't have any local Kroger brand stores other than Fred Meyers... I'm in Washington state, I don't think Kroger has any stores in my state or even the Pacific Northwest besides Fred Meyer. I could pick up some when I travel... but that would mean buying like $2000 worth at once like two or three times a year... and that might make the algorithm tingle more than just buying $400 or so every month. I know I could avoid the $5.95 ($6.95?) fee... but I still would be coming out ahead even if I factor in the cost of the VISA/MC fee, and really more important is building up the MR for me rather then the max % return I'm getting. This year I found myself like 4,000 points short of being able to transfer for an award ticket, but it wasn't worth the cost of transfer and then buying those miles from Delta, so I bought the ticket using out of pocket cash. If I had been earning 4x on grocery all year I would have been well over the amount I needed and spent points rather then $250 cash. Either way, excited to get the gold and 50k... I totally missed out on the 100k platinum offer by like 2 weeks when I applied a couple years ago and only got the 60k offer >.<