The Offer
- Get a $1 rebate for each purchase made at a unique merchant on up to 50 purchases per month, for the months of April, May and June. You can get up to $50 of rebates per month for a total of $150.
Amex is trying to encourage us to use the Bluebird card in place of an ordinary credit card, thus the focus on using the card at 50 unique merchants over the course of the month.
To maximize the offer, we’ll want to make small transactions at 50 separate merchants in April, repeat that in May and repeat it again in June. You can repeat the same merchants each month; the stipulation not to repeat the merchant is on a month-by-month basis.
The Fine Print
- This offer is targeted. Check your email to see if you received the offer.
- “Just make sure every place has a different name—that’s how you can tell if your purchase qualifies for a $1 back!” This wording sounds like you can’t repeat the same merchant in another location. For example, you won’t get the credit for swiping at two separate Starbucks locations.
- $50 max per month. If you use get less than $50 in one month, it won’t roll over to the next month.
- ” Purchase transactions may fall outside of the month in which you made the purchase if there is a delay in the merchant submitting the transaction information to us.” See this post where we discussed this issue in detail.
- May take up to 30 days for $1 credits to appear.
Our Verdict
It’s interesting to see an influx of targeted offers on Amex’s prepaid cards to try to get us to use the cards in place of ordinary credit cards. We saw a targeted offer on Serve to get 10¢ per swipe and another to get 1% cashback on all purchases.
From the three offers, I’d say this offer of $1 per transaction is best, though it has hardships of its own. In the past we’ve seen an offer with Softcard to get $1 per transaction, but it didn’t need to be at unique merchants and it was possible to find one plan and stick to it. For example, you could pump gas $1 at a time. Or you could go daily to the vending machine and buy something. Or McDonald’s dollar menu. With this offer, you’ll have to do one $1 pump of gas, one $1 vending machine, one $1 Amazon gift card, one $1 at McDonalds, etc.
In the final analysis, I’m not too perturbed that I didn’t get the offer since it would be a hassle to maximize, but if I got the offer I’d probably end up doing as many transactions as I could.
