Dad to GO

Just went to 2 of my local OD stores and all of the Vanillas have been pulled. The clerk said he heard they'd no longer be selling those types of cards anymore. They did have plenty if the older blue prepaids though.

Looks like I'll have to stick to getting a few $500 visa gift cards each month now. Somethings better than nothing.

myfrogger

Since the drinking challenge I've drank two full glasses of wine. Cheers!

jeanie

I don't know a ton about this, but I'll give it a shot. Walmart introduced a new prepaid Bluebird debit card that had functions somewhat like a checking account. The important part is that people could pay their mortgages, rent, taxes, or other big bills that traditionally do not take credit cards with this Bluebird card.

One way to add money to this prepaid card was to buy a vanilla card. Vanilla is the brand name of the card. There was a transaction fee to buy the vanilla card. But some people found out that they could buy the vanilla card with a regular credit card at Office Depot.

Now Office Depot is no longer selling the vanilla card, and is switching to a prepaid Amex.

So this was a way to be able to charge more to a credit card in order to get more points!

Is this somewhat correct? Haven't done this personally. It is just what I have picked up on this board.

ftbargain

I'm glad that OD is taking it off ....but, its available for purchase at CVS with a CC. Its better this way because it can be neatly used meet your spending requirements instead of being greedy for UR points. That way only few people will be chasing this at a given time and probably on multiple type of crdit cards..so, it may continue to live under the radar.

(I was just experementing..No INK card yet..Been to 3 OD yesterday- Nothing. Bought 2 from CVS using the Chase Freedom Card and Bought another 2 from another CVS using the Fidelity Amex 2% cash back today).

Theres is a Hilton element to this..but as hilton is considered (by most) as a less 'value' point, chasing Vanillas every day with a Hilton card may not be worth it for most folks.

all168

Buy as many as you can, in East Los Angeles, I went to no less than 7 CVS, a family dollar, 4 walgreen stores, 3 walmarts, they only take cash maybe atm, walmart won't even take atm. It's programmed at the register, even manager can't override it, or she/he did want to, but no luck. if I have to use ATM or cash to buy bean card, then BB will not attractive at all.

Marathon Man

Oh but they do... Yes, they do!

****

In other thinkings of an early morning mm mind, if adk is right and chase knife fought at amex, then soon amex will reveal some new thing on the shelves we can all do miles on. But then it will get plastered on the front pages and die by, oh, say this time next year maybe?...

ricohitman

Because vanilla visa can't be used at costco. I'm one of those people that actually USES these cards and doesn't just cash them out.

Marathon Man

One of its uses is to be cashed out (at an atm) so is that any different? Where did it say so in the t&c?

And also, there were many people who actually used netspend instead of just cashing that out, but all of them got shut down too.

So it doesnt make a difference in my mind.

All that said however, you actually do touch on a main point:

These entities secretly do despise those who *just* cash out such cards even if their own t&cs do not forbid it. Its strange but very true. I have seen this in other areas too but the point is that they make suppositions about the users of their products and that becomes the dictate.

I came to find that with netspend, it wasnt how it was used that caused a shut down, it was how the company saw what you loaded it with-- even as that product was on their own list of things you can in fact do.

yoyo

If you use them @ costco stick with costco cash cards. They are free (no fee) @costco.com.

scoobaboy

At least now I can stop trying to explain to my wife why we had to take out this card in order to purchase this other card, that was used to load this other card, which was used to pay off the first card, in order to earn points with this program, which were used to transfer to this other program. I don't know why she never understood.

caGALINDO

^

Marathon Man

Lol i think i saw both our wives having coffee together rolling their eyes about their husbands and paying in cash! And yet they wanted us to take them to barbados... In high season... With the kids, in the best hotel... Last minute, in first class, up hill... Both ways!

thegasguru

Hilarious!

Maybe you need to make your own video too.

pcharles

PointsG is still pimping this hard and strong, just this morning
"For instance, you can still get in on American Express’s Bluebird card, which I’ve been writing about a lot lately, and the lucrative bonus points you can earn by buying Vanilla Reloads at Office Depot. While there aren’t Office Depots in China, if you have a friend in the US that you trust to buy Vanilla Reloads for you and load them onto your Bluebird card, there’s no reason you can’t take advantage of the powerful spending tool the Bluebird card can be. And even if you’re not earning the 5x potential bonus by buying Vanilla Reloads at office supply stores, you can still get them at other outlets including CVS, where you can use a points-earning card to purchase them and then use the money to pay for expenses that you couldn’t normally use a credit card for.

That said, let’s put getting new credit cards aside for a moment..."

How bad do you think it hurt for him to even start typing that last line?

He's even suggesting you recruit your friends here to search out a dead deal. Pimping cards hard than ever this weekend and not even as much as a warning of recent events to the unsuspecting reader. Nice new low.

IkeEsq

Always the finger-pointing over who killed the deal. Was it the bloggers with their Thirst for Credit Card Referrals® or FlyerTalk with their X thousand post threads with X hundreds of thousands of views? Was it the greedy Old Time Mileage hackers who pushed too far or the ocean of newbies who got in on it without any idea how the game is played?

Guess what? It doesn't matter. There are not a lot of zombies in this game so once dead most things stay that way. The problem here is an economic one. Any deal that shifts the costs from one entity to another is going to die.

Example: The Mint.

The Mint produces $1 coins for less than $1 and can easily sell, package, and ship them for $500 for a case of 500 and still make a profit, even if you pay by credit card. Congress has ordered the Mint to get the coins into circulation.

Meanwhile, nobody wants the coins in commerce (except perhaps automated machines). It costs the banks money to accept them because they can't recirculate them and they need to store them, handle them, and ship them to the Federal Reserve, all of which costs money for no gain. The Fed also needs to pay to store millions and tens of millions of these coins that nobody wants.

Example: Bluebird.

American Express and WalMart make money off the transaction fees and use at WalMart stores and increase their membership base. To the extent that people reload and cash out, they can cancel accounts.

OD sells $500 card for $503.95, and lose perhaps $5-12.50 on credit card charges and payments to Chase to cover issuing 2500 UR points. OD sees an uptick in purchases of reload cards almost all of which costs them money. So they cancel it. They do not need to read blogs and FlyerTalk threads to figure out why people are doing this, they simply look at the bottom line and decide they are not making any money on the product.

Chase sees a large percentage of purchases getting 5X UR points at Office Supply stores and very little return and they cancel accounts.