acarney

I'm super curious about this too. I wonder if there would be a difference if it was $700 in VISA or MC gift cards compared to a retail gift card (think a store gift card, etc). I know Safeway sells Disney tickets and I was thinking of next year buying a 3 or 4 day Disney ticket bundle at a Safeway for 4x instead of at the theme park. I mean these are products at the store, not just something quick that can be liquidated back into cash. I would hope they would also be looking to see if you're doing $700 a week for a month or $700 every month for five months or something. A random selection of cards throughout the year, maybe especially around holidays, I would hope Amex would understand is probably legit spending and not manufactured spending.

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?

Diplomatico

Agreed. In fact, while many were happy about the "added benefits" to the refreshed Gold card, I found it interesting to read the comments of a smaller subset of cardholders who consider this card to have reduced their MR earning potential because the grocery spend was capped at $25K per year.

One commenter actually referred to the refresh as "a serious nerf" to the card's benefits.

jamesinclair

Unfortunately this is common. Should be as fast as swiping was, but it rarely is. Theres also poor feedback on most terminals if it is reading your card or not.

aubreyfromwheaton

can you pick one airline for your plat card and a different airline for this gold card?

keyjey

So in SF I use an app "Ritual"(Category "Restaurant - Bar & Café") to pick up my lunch. For the first few transactions it did not give me 4x points and I reached out to Amex customer care after my statement closed. Voila...starting this week all my Ritual orders are earning 4x. Not sure who fixed the issue.

tmiw

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of that is intentional, but that's a subject for the EMV/contactless threads in the main CC forum.

mia

Yes. They are entirely separate.

acarney

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....

jags86

acarney

Sinince

Got a weird email from AMEX. I applied for the PRG maybe a month before the changes were rumored.

Maybe my AF in late 2019 (past the April cutoff) will really be $195?

jags86

Diplomatico

First time ever using Grubhub. Very simple process, free delivery.....a more easily used benefit than I had anticipated. ^

PHLondoner

...explained all the Millenial posters over the last 5 weeks."

Unfortunately for my waist line my benefit keeps getting used up pretty quickly in the month at the ShakeShack down the street...