Via travelingwellforless, Office Depot now sells a new kind of Visa gift card called the Dining Anywhere gift card. It comes in a $200 denomination with a $4.95 activation fee, a bit of savings over the standard $6.95 fee.
Use your Dining Everywhere Visa® Gift Card for restaurants and bars, everywhere Visa debit is accepted, even online.
It’s mainly meant for using at dining locations, but as of now, it’s an ordinary PIN-enabled Visa gift card which works anywhere Visa debit cards are accepted. (Didn’t work for travelingwellforless on Bluebird, for some reason, but worked everywhere else as debit.)
[Update: A few readers say that it’s not working everywhere, whether with a PIN or without one.]
The card is issued by Metabank, and the default PIN is the last 4-digits of the card number.
The card can be found at some Office Depot locations, and the system there allows payment with credit card. Although a brief ‘Only cash purchases allowed’ message does pop up, the system allows credit card payment, without any sort of override. (Note that if you buy $1,000 or more at a time, your driver’s license, date of birth, and address are required.)
Let us know if you this Dining Anywhere card at Office Max or anywhere else in the wild.
Like everything, this probably won’t last forever. They might stop allowing credit card payment. They might increase the fees. Or they might limit its usage to dining only, similar to what happened to those home improvement cards. Use it while you can, just make sure to unload quickly since they might be able to limit its acceptance to dining-only.
It’s also worth noting that these Dining Anywhere Visa gift cards are variable-load $20-$200, versus the standard fixed-value $200 cards. We usually want the highest denomination, but I’m sure the variable-load option will be useful sometime, someplace.
Hat tip to Milestomemories where I first learned about this.
