A reader tipped me off that Toys R Us was NOT charging the usual $4.95 fee on Vanilla VGC back in July 2017, and you know what, the deal was still ALIVE as of 2 days ago. In this day and age, I’m SHOCKED that this MS nugget lasted this long. I’m even more shocked that Toys R Us never even fixed the problem. Maybe they liked seeing their store gross sales rising. I mean, I shouldn’t be totally surprised since people were getting all kinds of free or deeply discounted stuff due to their coupon glitches these past few months.
Yes, the One Vanilla cards were ringing up NO FEE. You could even go up to $9,000 (the most I did in one transaction.) With some social engineering, I did 17K in one trip. I simply asked the girl who was ringing me up, “What’s the limit on these cards?” and she told me, “I don’t think there’s any.” Since she must have been a shift lead or something since a manager wasn’t called, I went and got another 8K. The bottleneck was the OV inventory at the store. Eventually the OV’s ran out and it turns out the other black and white Vanilla cards didn’t work. However, it then turned out the Wonder Woman vanilla Mastercards were also no-fee. The odd thing is that they kept restocking the Wonder Woman cards since I thought it was a limited run due to the movie. Go figure.
To make this deal even better, these could be easily liquidated at USPS back in the day. Thus it cost you .16c per point.
Anyway, as of yesterday, I’ve heard management has pulled all the cards, and even if you find cards, you’ll have activation issues, so don’t even try it.
RIP to both Toys R Us and these no fee vanilla MC’s.
Also shout out to the people who knew about this and kept this going for as long as we did.
We went once. We purchased them and they were immediately deactivated, so we never tried again.
Hi Vihn, love the site. I am learning a lot from you. What card were you using for these purchases?
it was unbonused spend, so i used a 3% card.
In your most recent round-up email, you say “For the record, I’m embarrassed to admit that this one flew past me, too — guess my TRU test purchases were of the wrong flavor.”, suggesting you didn’t know about this MS nugget. In this post, you say you did know about it. I’m curious to know which is the truth.
Kcblakely – the round up email you are referring to was a different blogger than Vinh.
Fwiw, TRU still has a buyer interested in the 200 most profitable stores. TRU could come back from the dead, and this deal might come with it- i.e., it’s possible this posting is premature.
Haha yeah that was a good one. Actually saw it posted on reddit last year. Post was up about 8 minutes before we told the guy to delete it.
If that’s your real name, your parents must be huge Saved By The Bell fans.
Holy **** what a deal