Seems as of today, Safeway stores are switching over to Incomm as their primary gift card source. I was in my store earlier in the day and was able to buy some Metabank MGC and by the time I went back at night, the store had switched over to Vanilla VGC. I was able to buy those and activate them just fine as well.
Some folks in another region say they are seeing a $6.95 fee for their VGC, but my store had the $5.95 ones. I’m guessing they’re going to slowly transition to the $6.95 ones like at drug stores. Early bird gets the worm…
Also, this may be the death of Happy card bonuses at Safeway since Incomm doesn’t stock those.
These cards are not fraud proof like Vanilla says and on the user agreement it says they are not responsible for fraud. Safeway is selling people stolen goods
does SS VGC have a wait time for it to be active after purch? Thx
follow up to a previous Q: it’s a vanilla vgc
hey Vinh, i happened to buy an Incomm VGC with bin# 4097 5 on the card; does still load $500 with 1 swipe at WM? Thx
I don’t know; I haven’t gone to WMT in a year
It is important to point out that these days, a lot of the Vanilla gift cards are actually issued by MetaBank, and not Bancorp as they used to be. Says so on the back of a lot of Vanilla Gift Cards now. Also, if you look closely at the picture in the post on the bottom right, you’ll see that the One Vanilla cards in the black package have actually been replaced by “SecureSpend” cards, even though the packaging is basically identical, and don’t have Vanilla branding on them at all. These too are issued by MetaBank now. This is huge because they work at Wal-Mart for debit purchases in the full $500 amount in one swipe (just did it yesterday), whereas Vanilla cards have traditionally been limited to $49.99 swipes for years now.
Gonna miss the Happy Card promotions. I used to be able to rack up some good rewards around the holidays.