OfficeMax Offering Gift Card Coupon

Bluebird to the rescue again!

OfficeMax is offering a promotion that can seriously help you boost your points/miles. The deal: Spend over $200 on Visa or MasterCard gift cards, and you get $10 off.

The great thing about these gift cards is that you can load them into your Bluebird account. This promo works best if you have the Chase Ink Bold. The 5x bonus points at office supply stores will beef up your Ultimate Rewards point to the point where you can effectively be paid to travel.

The Process

1. Go to OfficeMax and snap up as many of these gift cards as possible.
• Don't spend over $2,000 at a time. If you do, OfficeMax is required to take down your information.
• Try to purchase the $200 cards. Unfortunately for me, they've always been out so I've been buying the $100 cards.
• Activation fee of each card costs $5.95 for $100 gift.
• Activation fee of each card costs $6.95 for $200 gift.
2. Assign a PIN to each of your cards.
• Visa gift card PINs can be created at https://mygift.giftcardmall.com/
• MasterCard gift card PINs can be calling 1-866-952-5653 and going through the automated system.
3. Go to Walmart's Money Center to load these gift cards (as debit cards, and using your newly created PIN) into your Bluebird account.
4. PROFIT! (... at a small loss. Or a small gain. We'll get into that.)

NOTE:
Make sure you separate out your transactions to $200 due to the offer terms: $10 coupon per transaction for anything over $200.

• If you're buying ten $100 gift cards, do five transactions.
• If you're buying three $200 gift cards, do three transactions.

This assures you receive $10 dollars at every $200 increment.

David's Experience

I spent $1,400 on fourteen $100 card. Each of those fourteen cards had an activation fee of $5.95. The OfficeMax cashier was stellar and patiently worked through seven separate transactions to maximize the deal of $10 off $200.

I immediately brought the cards home and went to https://mygift.giftcardmall.com/ to create an account, add my cards and create PINs for them.

The next day, I went to Walmart and loaded my Bluebird. At first, I did it on my own on the Money Center ATM. That sucked, especially since I can only load one card at a time. What sucked more was that the damn ATM announced every action I did. "What do you want to do?" "How much do you want to reload?" "You are reloading for $100. Is this correct?"

After loading one card, I decided it would be less embarrassing to go to a customer service rep. Wrong. They tried to load multiple cards, but the entire transaction got voided by the system. So I actually still loaded one card a time.

10 minutes, 13 card swipes, and countless curious stares later, I was out the door with money in my Bluebird.

The Numbers

I charged $201.90 seven times on my Chase Ink Bold:

($100 + $100 + 2($5.95)) - $10) = $201.90

What this boils down to is that I paid $13.30 (or $0.95 activation fee per card) for 7,067 Chase Ultimate Reward points because of Ink's 5x points bonus:

($201.90 x 7) x 5 bonus points = 7066.5

In other words, that's 0.2 cents per point.

But if you're lucky enough to snag the $200 gift cards, you would be paying $196.95 for $200:

$200 + $6.95 - $10 = $196.95
In other words, you're being paid 0.3 cents for each point you earn.

A transfer of 25k British Avios points from Chase Ultimate reward points at the $100 gift card rate could fly you from LAX to Hawaii round-trip for $47.50. If you are lucky to find the $200 gift cards, you can get that same trip, but get paid $75 for it!

It's a tough deal to get paid to travel, huh?