Simon Malls has been the best deal in town for gift cards for a long time now. My local mall knows me by name I go there so much! It is my favorite way of Manufactured Spending to generate miles! By using a card such as the Barclaycard® Rewards MasterCard® you can even make a profit!
About two weeks ago though they realized how good they had it and decided to increase their profits a bit by changing the fees on their gift cards from $2.95 / card to $3.95. They also changed the gift card issuer from US Bank to Metabank. 
The Bad
If you buy $10,000 at a time (like I have been known to do), this increases the fee cost from $59 to $79! They also have recently made a change where you can only get up to $10,000 a day including the fees so you will either have to get 9K or 9.5K in cards if you want to max it out.
The Good
The good news is that they are now stocking dozens of different designs so they will almost always have enough stock for you to buy as many as you like.
Since they changed from US Bank to Metabank, the process to change the PIN has changed slightly.
To set the PIN code, you call the number on the back of the card which is currently 1-866-325-6238. Once you get the process down it can be quite quick and you don’t have to wait for the whole prompt to play before entering the next option.
- Hit 1 as soon as it picks up to skip to the next prompt
- Enter the 16 digit account number followed by the # key
- Wait for the prompt to start then enter the 4 digit expiration date (without the # key)
- Enter the 3 digit CVV security code from the back of the card followed by the # key
- When the prompt starts enter 5 to change your PIN
- Enter a 4 digit PIN code you want to use
- Enter the 4 digit PIN code again to confirm
- When it says “Congratulations” you can hang up.
Conclusion
Even at $3.95 it is still worth it to generate the miles. To buy 60K in gift cards (which is enough for a round trip to Europe) you will pay $474. Not a bad price! It will be a little more if you are buying money orders at Walmart or Kroger. As long as you are smart about your redemptions though you should be able to get tons more value for your miles than you paid.
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