Officemax is having a promotion this week until June 15, 2013 where if you buy $200 worth of Mastercard or Visa gift cards you get $10 off. Since these are MC/Visa gift cards, there are activation fees of either $6.95 (if your OfficeMax has $200 cards) or $5.95 (if your OfficeMax only has $100 cards). After the discounts, you will pay $196.95 if they have $200 cards and $201.90 if you have to buy two $100 cards like I did. I took $400 worth of cards to the cashier and got her to ring up the orders separately so I got a discount on both orders. She did have to look up the coupon in a binder that she had to get the discount. Since I paid with my Chase Ink Bold card, I get 5X Ultimate Rewards points on office supply stores. Since I bought $400 worth that means 2000 more Ultimate Rewards points for me!
If you use your Chase Ink Bold or Chase Ink Plus cards then you will get 5X$200 = 1,000 Ultimate Reward Points for your purchase. You can use these gift cards for everyday spend like groceries or gas or you can deposit them to your Amex Prepaid card or Bluebird and then take it out at an ATM.
I will probably get more of these since paying $1.90/1000 points is a great deal. Just to put this into perspective, if your OfficeMax only has the $100 cards, then you could get 60,000 Ultimate Rewards points for $114 in fees by buying 120 $100 gift cards (if your Officemax let you buy that many 2 at a time). If they have $200 gift cards at your store, you could buy 60 of them and make 60,000 Ultimate rewards and PROFIT $183 while doing it! You could use those 60,000 points for a coach ticket to Ibiza at the end of summer on United since they are a transfer partner of Ultimate Rewards. I just checked and there is availability!
I don’t really expect many of you to go around to 10 different OfficeMax stores buying $12,000 worth of gift cards, but you could do it to get a free or almost free trip! All you need is the Chase Ink Bold or Chase Ink Plus cards to take advantage of offers like these because they give you 5X Ultimate Rewards Points at office supply stores. I will probably end up with $1,000 worth of cards and 5,000 miles from this offer. Gotta love the points and miles game!
