Introduction
So last night (Monday night) at about 11:10PM PST, the AMEX Staples $25 off $100 offer popped up on Slickdeals. I notified the people I knew about the offer, and most like myself were able to add it to our cards…well the ones who were still awake anyway (sorry EST people.) Anyway, people on Slickdeals were reporting that it was also on their Serve accounts too, which clearly meant there had to be a Twitter offer. I was one of the first few people to tweet #AmexStaples, but nothing happened.
I had assumed the Twitter handle wasn’t up yet (kinda like how the AMEX Whole Foods offer showed up on cards first before the Twitter hashtag was live. I did a quick search and found out that #AMEXWFM became available at 7AM PST, so I figure I need to tweet that the first thing I woke up. Of course I woke up and the hashtag still wasn’t working and GASP! It actually had already died at around 3AM PST (I guess all the offers had been taken up.) Later in the day, we see the Offers Bot tweet.
AMEX Offers changes the Twitter hashtags now
So it looks like they changed the hashtag from what we all expected #AmexStaples to #AmexStaplesNov. Genius move on their part. Even more genius move by the guy who actually tweeted it first to get OffersBot’s attention.
What have we Learned
Really this should only affect the really hot offers like Staples and possibly Dell and Office Depot. That means when this Staples AMEX offer is available in say March 2016, we should try all these hashtags:
- #AmexStaples
- #AmexStaplesMar
- #AmexStaplesMarch
- #AmexStaplesMarch2016
- #AmexStaples2016
- #AmexStaplesandKanye2020
- #AmexStaplesJustSoWeCanMessWithYou
- #AmexStaplesOfficeDepot
- #AmexStaplesOfficeDepotMax
You get the drift. Now that we know the game, time for us to adapt.
AS a side light of this I learned of this Staples offer in the morning yesterday. Of course it was beyond dead by then. I have tried to set up alerts for groovy things like this but so far have been unsuccessful.
HOWEVER! Yesterday I did learn my lesson on being lazy about AMEX offers. Several days ago I started in to set up the 20 off 200 thing-ee for Best Buy. I got tired of switching from Twitter account to another and decided to skip some of them and do another time. Yesterday I finally had a chance to go to Best Buy.
One of the reasons I had been so-so on getting thi9s deal done is that I wanted to do the $200 VGCs from there but my BBY was always out of stock. Of course yesterday they were not! So, a score on 9 Amexes. Zoomed home to put the offer on the rest of my cards. TOO LATE THEY ARE GONE!
What is the lesson? I will write it out so simple even I can understand:
DO THE WORK TO GET THE DEALS WHEN THEY ARE OFFERED!!
So, learning as I go, the lessons are learned. I am glad I scored as I did but even as I keep reading this and other blogs, I keep learning.
I appreciate your writings here as always and as you state, we will have to be more observant of the Amex Trickery & Voo Doo as we go.
Thanks!
Nice find. Yeah, I suggest you create new Twitter accounts to avoid the time wasted swapping out cards. Set yourself up for future success now. Haha.
Oh, I have twitter accounts for each card separately. Same with Amex log-ins. Just got lazy is all.