Random News: Gas Savings with Bluebird, Free Avis and National Car Rental Elite Status, Cautionary Tale for Loading at Family Dollar, and Many AMEX Offers: Fig & Olive, Kate Spade, Wine.com, and Others
Good evening everyone, I haven’t talked about Bluebird much since I switched over to Serve, but I received an email from Raul about a cool promo from Bluebird and Walmart. If you go to this site, you can see if your state is eligible for a gas saving offer.
The offer is only valid in the following states:
Based on the state you live in (or the state you typically buy gas in), you can save between 3 and 15 cents per gallon by using your Bluebird Card at the pump.
You need to find a participating gas station which you can find here. As far as I know, there is no similar offer for Serve Cards.
Frequent Miler had a great post about free Avis and National car rental elite status (link).
Yesterday, I received an email from Mary E. about a problem she experienced while loading her Serve Card at Family Dollar:
I just went to Family Dollar to add $500 to my Amex Serve with a Vanilla Visa Gift Card. The transaction seemed to go through fine – on the pin pad, said approved, then a few lines down, “declined.” The entire cash register shut down, the screen said “fraud alert,” etc….they spent 5-10 minutes trying to void the transaction, then finally shut down the register.
I offered to come back after another errand. When I did, I was told by the manager that they could only load $495 max, and that, due to the fraud alert, I had to come back 24 hours later. Fine. When I got home, I checked my gc balance – sure enough – $500 was gone. But it was NOT added to my AMEX Serve Account. So $500 has disappeared. I will try to call Family Dollar Corporate, but at this point, do I have any other options??? I can’t believe this has happened! And I have no receipt b/c the register shut down (I asked for one).
I offered some advice to Mary E:
Good evening Mary E., thank you for the email. I am terribly sorry that your AMEX Serve reload did not go smoothly. I have heard other stories of issues at Family Dollar. From what I have heard from others online, your $500 are in limbo between your GC and your AMEX Serve. I believe after 7-10 days, the funds will show back onto your GC, which you can then use. To be safe, I would call Family Dollar’s Corporate number and let them know about the issue so they can create a ticket/reference number for any future interactions. I think the only thing you can do now is wait for the funds to appear back onto your GC. Please let me know if you have any other questions and please keep me updated on the issue. I might write a blog post about this and your feedback/experience might be able to help others in a similar situation.
This morning, I received a response:
Here’s a follow-up to last night’s debacle. I called the one number for Family Dollar (866-377-6420) and chose the option to complain about the store. Was then told to call Cash and Sales at 800-547-0359 and choose option 9, then ask for Cash and Sales. Explained what happened, then was told to talk to “Angela.” Was transferred to her (yay, 3 live people in a row, good job FD). She needed 5 minutes to look at the transactions, then said she could see what happened. Bad news is will take 7-10 business days to credit to my bank acct and up to 30 (THIRTY) business days to credit by vgc. But she was very confident it would happen and said to call her again after 30 bds if the funds didn’t show.
Also – fyi -she said the limit had been met at my store earlier in the day at 11am. So ONE person adding money to serve 10 hours earlier is what messed this whole thing up. The store I went to (in the NC triangle) has a $500 limit. Grrr….
Feel free to share this info with others.
I followed up with a question about loading her Serve Card:
Good afternoon Mary E., thank you for sharing the details. Are you 100% positive that someone loaded $500 at the same store earlier in the day is what caused the issue? That sounds like a terrible system if it were true. If it is true, it sounds like going early in the morning is the best way to go to reduce future issues. Let me know if you hear any other news from Family Dollar regarding the GC loading. Have a great day!
Her reply:
Yes 100% positive, according to Angela from corporate. I had read of this online on flyertalk as well. Yes, going early is the trick I think. But yes, bad system.
Moral of the story, if you plan on loading your Serve Card at Family Dollar, do one $500 load early in the morning. Let me know if you have experienced any issues like Mary E.
Last but not least, here are a bunch of new AMEX Offers for You that showed up on several of my AMEX cards:
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Good night everyone!
P.S. I am working on creating a page with links to all my retention and reconsideration calls along with finishing up the convertible/downgradeable credit cards page. I never seem to have enough time to do everything :(
Grant,
I have heard that some people recently have had success loading Bluebird with Vanilla/OneVanilla gift cards.
Yes, that is true. Check the comment section of my No VRCs? Try OneVanilla post.
Family Dollar should have immediately refunded the money back on her card. Same thing happened to me. It was a pain. It was the first time it had ever happened at the FD I went to. The next day, they gave me the money back in cash.
That is a good deal. What caused the transaction to fail? Any idea?
The 15 cents / gallon discount with BB is comparable to the 5x cashback / points available with some CCs at gas stations. Also, using the BB for gasoline helps (slightly) to diversify my spend on it to something other than billpay. So, I use my BB to fill up whenever I visit the local WM that has a Murphy gas station.
I would think 15 cents off is a better deal than 5x since you would have to get more than 3 cpp to come out ahead.
I’m not sure I follow your logic. If you get 5x, isn’t that like getting (at least) 5% back? If gas is $4/gallon, then that is like 20 cents off. I guess maybe gas is much cheaper for people lucky enough to not have to pay California gas prices.
That’s true. 5x or 5% cash back seems to be be a better deal that 15 cents off a gallon.
Grant, I’ve had no problems loading $500 at a time at FD. I would only do $500 per day based on reports from other people having their money tied up, even though, I believe FD technically allows larger loads each day. Thanks for the heads up in case I run into a problem. I know their system is glitchy. Hopefully they fix it systemwide.
I’m just curious what states have Family Dollar, any idea?
I don’t have the whole list. I live in Rhode Island and there are over 30 stores in my state. MA has a lot of FD too, most of them are in the Boston area.
Oh my goodness… Thank you so much for posting the information about Amex Serve reload at Family Dollar. I had the exact same problem a month ago, and I tried calling the store, the FD corporate office, the OneVanilla help line (which is not helpful at all. They outsource their fax processing to InComm and they keep having communication issues with InComm to verify the faxes I sent to them multiple times), and nothing worked. I was about to give up and then your post saved the day. I called Angela (btw with FD, you need to be EXTREMELY patient with the wait time) and she located the problem in no time. 5 min. of chat with her solved the problem that took away at least 5 hours of my life.
Grant, just a suggestion, can you start a separate email update that is specific for helping fellow milers to solve issues with MSing? (something similar to Frequent Miler’s Quic Deal) I think a lot of us run into issues when MSing, and it would be easier for the needy to find the timely help they need instead of ready through a long email about various topics.
Love your blog!
I’m glad the post helped fix your problem. When you say “separate email update,” do you mean a separate post just for the Family Dollar section?
FYI, earlier of the day that I had trouble loading AMex Serve at Family Dollar, I loaded $500 on my Amex Serve card at the same store with OneVanilla card, so (A) FD system most likely have a daily Amex reload limit for each store, and (B) OneVanilla cards are back in the game! (at least for now)
Grant, I did my Serve load at FD in San Diego – 4x over the last fe weeks. You’ve got my email. Let me know if you need some more info. Thanks for the hotel potal / orbitz info last week BTW.
You’re welcome about the Orbitz deal. It is a free $25 off your next hotel stay.
Grant, do you think it might make a difference if people loaded some amount other than $500.00? This is probably a long shot, but if someone loads $500 early in the morning and then a second person loads $499.xx (like $499.37 or some random amount), I wonder if the system would be more likely to let it go through. If not, at least it might be easier for FD to research the transaction and find it out of the stream of $500 loads.
That might work, but I have no idea. No Family Dollar stores near me to try this out at.
yeah the closest one is in orange on chapman ave. not gonna drive that far just to try to MS $500 and maybe not have it work!
I wouldn’t bother either.