Originally Posted by
krazykanuck
You think Amex really cares? They get the same swipe fee either way, and as long as it's not for the purposes of meeting min spend, Amex DGAF about MSing so long as you don't trip any fraud/FR wires. All of my grocery store transactions of $500 VGCs + beer/bananas/bread/etc are coding as 4x. I'm not concerned, but then again I'm not racing to do $25k in spend before year end. But on an annualized basis that's only $2k/month. That's nothing VGC volume wise. I think Amex on a certain level knows people will MS this. I mean why else would they have put a cap of $25k on the grocery store category, while leaving restaurants and air travel uncapped, even through they're 4x and 3x?
That's good to hear.... though I thought I remember hearing a bunch of talk from this site about Amex being the only one that really DID care about MS and actively cracked down on it by shutting down accounts or locking them, etc. Now I don't know what kind of volume that was, but I thought the general advice here was NOT to do any MS with Amex cards, period. (I just question this because again, I don't really think retail cards are MS and with this card having a cap, I figure it might not be focused as heavy compared to other cards)
Edit: Also, you're right about the swipe fee, but what are they charging, 3.5% or so? That's $17.50 on a $500 gift card that earns 4x points... well 2,000 points at $0.014/point would be $28, or a LOSS of $10.50 for Amex on that transaction. I know a lot of you here are also getting more than 1.4c/point value, I was just getting that number from my last Delta transfer/redemption value....