Happy Mother’s Day to all my Manufactured Spend Mothers out there
A couple of miscellaneous things for this Mother’s Day weekend. I’ve been in this hobby for over 3 years now, and I still haven’t flown a true 1st class experience yet (sorry United, you don’t count, especially since your Global First still had one of these in 2012:)
My parents used to fly me business class on Eva Air to Vietnam back in the late 90’s because I was such a tall kid. I always saw the steps to go upstairs (747 perhaps?) but never once ventured or peaked up there. Back then, I think it was around $1,000 roundtrip in coach and maybe $1500 in business. We never had the money or even knew what first class was like. So a couple of years ago, I put my mom on ORD-NRT in one of the new ANA Suites. She flew IAH-ORD on the first leg, and when she got off the plane, an ANA rep stood at the gate with a sign to take her to her ANA flight. She had no idea she was going to sit in First. She called me from the plane, and I could hear her excitement over the phone. She took plenty of photos, but too bad she was on medication, so she couldn’t drink all any of their Dom (Krug?) On the way back, she was in coach, but she had an aching knee at the time, and so I asked her if she wanted to upgrade to First (I think United First.) My mom usually turns down these types of things, and although she blamed her bad knee, I think we all knew better. After the flight, I asked her how it compared to her ANA flight, she kinda sighed at me, “Oh, the first one was much nicer.” I’ve learned lately that racking up millions of points is worthless if you can’t share it with your loved ones.
AMEX $5 off $25 at Chevron expiring on 5/15
You guys remember in previous offers like the Best Buy $25 off $250, the purchases were cumulative? So you could buy a $200 item, then buy a $75 item later and you’d still get the $25 credit? Well, this happened to me last month because I used up Safeway points for $1 off:
Talk about a face palm to the forehead! I out-dealed myself! The thought of pumping $1.62 into the ground crossed my mind for a millisecond, but realized it wasn’t worth the risk of blowing up the gas station for $5. So I went 2 weeks ago and pumped $2 more worth of gas. No $5 credit. Now that you mention it, I think it’s the gas station’s fault since I went back a 3rd time and used a different card to charge $25 and didn’t get that credit either. The bill is coded as “CHEVRON CAR WASH ENTISSAQUAH WA.” I’ve never had this happen before. Not sure if I should call AMEX or tweet AMEX Offers to fix this erroneous charge so I can get a $5 credit.
Sam’s Club
Picked up my Groupon Sam’s Club membership yesterday. I haven’t been to one in over a decade; glad to see they’ve upgraded their printers to now print your picture in color instead of b&w. Btw, before FatKat and I go nuts on this deal buying GC’s, read my Walmart tale from December. Of course I’ll keep you guys updated.
Amazon FBA
Just sold my first item through FBA. Thanks to Trevor’s beginner’s guide to FBA. The 24lb food processor went from WA to TN, which cost me $15.55 to ship (that’s with the super reduced Amazon UPS rate). After everything is said and done, I had a profit margin of 11.8%, not counting the shopping portal miles and the discounted gift card. If it had gone to Amazon’s CA warehouse, it would have only been $9 to ship, and a profit margin of 15.5%. I had sold the exact same item on Ebay 2 weeks ago before I was banned, and that had a profit margin of 14.5%. I’ll need more data points, but so far, I’m more than willing to give extra money to Amazon instead of Ebay.
Kohl’s
I tried to use my 3rd Kohl’s account to buy something yesterday. Immediate rejection. Not sure if they banned all 3 of my accounts or any accounts using my Kohl’s charge card. I then created an account for my wife using my phone’s 4G and incognito mode and succeeded in buying the item using her SPG card. I’m not going to try to add my Kohl’s charge card to her account since I don’t want to risk it. I am going to try to use my remaining Cardpool gift cards in store though; who knows how many of those are flagged in their system…
Free $25 AMEX gift card from Inspirato
I don’t know how I was targeted for this, but I remembered getting an email about it. I flagged it and totally forgot about it. One day, I re-read it, and went ahead and registered anyway. Sure enough, I got the $25 AMEX GC in the mail. I also got 3 emails from an account rep asking me a good time to call to discuss Inspirato; all of which I further ignored. From what I understand, it looks like AMEX’s version of a timeshare. No thanks, but thanks for the $25. Looking back at the email, this was sent to my AMEX Blue card account from 20 years ago (not sure why they wouldn’t target Platinum members instead of the no annual fee Blue.)
