The Offer
- Purchase $500 or more in Whole Foods gift cards at a Whole Foods store and receive a 10% gift card for yourself. For example, if you buy $600 in gift cards, you’ll get an extra $60 gift card free.
This offer is found, at least, at two Whole Foods locations (NYC &Â Boston) and probably nationwide at all locations. The picture above is from the Boston location’s ad on Twitter.
From the image above, it looks like the offer will be valid all December although some stores are showing an end-date of 12/27.
Stack with Amex
What makes this deal amazing is that an Amex Offer is going on to save $10 off $60 at Whole Foods until 1/31/16. (Unclear if this offer is still available to be saved or is only for those who already saved it.)
Buy $540 in Whole Foods gift cards, split between nine separate registered Amex cards and pay just $450 for $594 in Whole Foods. That’s almost a 25% discount!
Lock in your Whole Foods credit for the year!
Tip for Splitting the Charge
Update: See this comment
One important tip: Frequentmiler reported in the past that the Whole Foods registers won’t allow three charges of the same amount, one after the next. Change the charge from $60 to $61 or something of the sort.
Be sure to calculate this into the gift card amount you request initially. If you have nine Amex cards, you may want to buy a $550 gift card, instead of $540, and give yourself wiggle room to stagger the transaction amounts.
Reselling
As noted in a post earlier today, Whole Foods gift cards can’t be sold on Raise anymore, but physical cards can be sold to the exchanges. Cardpool is offering 83% currently.
- Pay $450 for $594 in gift cards
- Sell for $493 to Cardpool
- Net: $43
It’s a bit much of hassle for $43, and there’s also a chance of devaluation here, but some may consider it also for the bonus credit card points. Whole Foods is regarded as a supermarket, and you’ll get 6% cashback with Blue Cash Preferred, or whatever other bonus offered for grocery.
Anyone in NYC saw visa gift cards at whole foods ? Do they sell visa gift cards ?
My local WFM in chicago area was not aware of this promo, so this may not be nationawide
The manager at my local NYC store was suspicious of my desire to charge several cards. Despite my patient and straight forward explanation, she insisted I may only buy one card with one credit card, and only with a primary credit card. Argh! I have gone in on separate occasions to purchase one gift card per visit, but it doesn’t seem this offer has any way to track the combined purchases.
Sounds like an over active mgr to me.
People split transactions all the time.
Thanks for linking to my tip about splitting charges at Whole Foods. I do have an update though: With the latest Amex Offer, I was able to split the payment evenly for one gift card across 5 Amex cards without any trouble. I don’t know if they fixed the register issue or if the person I had bought from before had done something incorrectly.
Thanks Greg
I wish I shopped there more often… I only go there like once a month, $500 is too much for me to have tied up there. if the threshold was $100 I would be all over it.
Warning to all: there has been a note on various website about some breach that occurred with their gift card verification system, apparently all gift cards are being zeroed out of their balance, so even if you buy a valid card now, it may not be something that can be used later on, or you might have a problem with it. This is the reason why Raise has discontinued the selling of these cards. FYI
Can you provide a link to an article about this? I searched Bing and found nothing about it. I just checked 2 gc that I’ve had for several months and both balances seem to be correct,
http://www.nbc29.com/story/30803454/whole-foods-experiencing-online-gift-card-scam
Of what I heard from one of the major gift card market reselling sites: even cards that are being bought on the whole foods gift card website themselves are being drained from their balance late after their purchase. so let’s say I want to go ahead and resell a valid card I myself bought, It may end up being zeroed out in a few days or weeks and then you’ll be debited in your sellers account.
This is good information but it isn’t really relevant to this post. The deal that Chuck mentioned is buying a $500+ gc at the store so that shouldn’t be affected by this.
http://www.eater.com/2015/12/22/10648970/whole-foods-gift-cards-scam