I have started going to the gym regularly lately with the whole 9 yards of a controlled diet and protein shakes, fish oil, creatine etc. I recently ran out of my “Whey Protein” and hadn’t planned ahead. I usually buy almost everything online so I can get miles or cashback by going through a shopping portal. But in this case, I needed to buy it today and locally. I know that GNC is a good albeit sometimes overpriced vitamin shop that carried the Optimum Nutrition brand I use. I checked online and it was on sale for $56.99 which was about what I had paid before.
The normal method of getting miles for purchases is to just use a card such as my SPG Business Amex to get 1 point per $1 spent, which would have given me 57 points. But I can do better than that! There is a Staples close to where I live that has GNC gift cards. And since Staples is an Office Supply store, if I use my Chase Ink Bold, I receive 5X points for anything spent there, including gift cards! So into Staples I go and I pick up two $25 GNC cards.
For this purchase I will get 250 Ultimate Reward points ($50X5) that I can eventually transfer to airline miles or hotel points or even cash! I then went to my local GNC and paid for my purchase with the gift cards and put the additional $7 on another card that earned me 7 more miles. This netted me a total of 257 Miles instead of just 57. Nice!
But I could have done even better if I hadn’t been in a rush and had planned ahead. By going to the EVReward.com site, I see that if I had shopped online at GNC.com using the ShopDiscover portal, I could have gotten an additional 15% back in cold, hard, cash through my Discover It® Card.
As you can see from the above chart, there are many different ways to get miles and cash at GNC.com. Pick the one you value the most! And you can use this in combination with the gift cards you got from Staples with your Chase Ink Bold!
I know this is a simple example and not a whole lot of points or miles, but I hope this makes you think next time you need to buy something about how many miles or points you should be getting!
