The more you know: earning secret Giant gas and grocery points

I’ve been doing most of my grocery store manufactured spend lately at Safeway, since they’ve had great offers recently for better-than-free Visa and MasterCard prepaid debit cards. When these deals come along it almost doesn’t matter what credit card you use, but the best options are obviously cards that bonus grocery store spend, like the Chase Freedom this quarter, the Sapphire Preferred or Reserve in May and June, or the American Express Hilton Honors Surpass or Aspire cards, with their uncapped 12 points per dollar spent at grocery stores through July.

As a reminder, you typically have two weeks to redeem these Safeway promotions, but they are only available to “add” to your Shop Your Way account during the week they appear in the app, so be sure to add them to all your accounts immediately when the promotions go live.

The other model of grocery store discount is the one preferred by the Giant/Stop & Shop/Martin’s grocery store chain, where you earn bonus gas points on prepaid debit cards instead. In some areas, including mine, these points can now be redeemed for credit towards a future grocery purchase, so they are much more “cash-like” than they used to be. Still, given the choice, I prefer a slightly smaller up-front discount than the hassle of trying to perfectly match up my grocery bill with my store credit.

Strange, but true: earn bonus gas points even when your store doesn’t advertise them

Word typically goes around Twitter and the blogosphere quickly once a new grocery store promo goes live, which is extremely convenient if you’re like me and either don’t receive or instantly trash your weekly circular. The circulars are available online, so it’s easy to plug your ZIP code in and see whether your local stores are participating.

Or so I thought.

Earlier this week, Stephen Pepper over at Frequent Miler mentioned in passing:

“If you live near Giant or Stop & Shop stores, this deal isn’t appearing in your weekly ad. For some reason, that’s been the case for the last couple of months or so – gift card deals are displayed in the weekly ad for Martin’s but not Giant or Stop & Shop. This offer is still available at all three chains though despite not being listed in all weekly ads.”

I’ve been travel hacking long enough to know that as bizarre as this sounds, that’s no reason to doubt it — the very existence of travel hacking is so bizarre most people have trouble believing it really exists. But I wanted to make sure, so I trundled over to my local Giant, which did not list the promotion in this week’s circular, to find out for myself (and, obviously, my beloved readers).

Embarrassingly, I’d moved so much of my grocery store spend over to Safeway that the entire Giant store location had been redesigned since my last visit, and I was almost afraid Giant had stopped selling prepaid debit cards altogether. It turned out they had moved the gift card center to just inside the store’s one-way exit, so you conveniently now have to walk all the way through the store, past the checkout lanes, then re-enter the store to make your purchase.

Since I had not yet maxed out the $1,500 cap on one of my Chase Freedom cards, I used that to buy the prepaid Visa debit card, knowing I’d come out ahead whether or not I earned the bonus gas points. Fortunately for me, and for you if you’re in an area served by Giant, Pepper was right and I did earn the bonus points.

But that’s not all.

Stranger, but still true: earn bonus gas points even when they don’t show up on your receipt

When I sat down to write this post, I was expecting to write the exact opposite of the above. I was planning to share a contrary datapoint, concluding that while there may be some stores where bonus points are earned regardless of whether the promotion is advertised or not, you shouldn’t count on it, and do your own research instead.

That’s because when I checked out, the bonus points did not appear on my receipt. Whenever you check out at Giant using a rewards card, there are two lines on the bottom portion of the receipt, “Points this visit” and “Points total.” The receipt reported that I had earned 0 points on the card, and that my points total was also 0.

It was only when I sat down to write this post that it occurred to me to double check using the Giant app, and as soon as I opened it, there they were: 1,524 points, redeemable for $15 in free groceries.

Conclusion

There’s no reason to believe there’s necessarily a connection between these datapoints. It may be the fact prepaid debit card deals aren’t printed in some stores’ circulars is one error, points nonetheless being awarded is a second, unrelated error, and awarded points not appearing on receipts is a third, also unrelated error. Likewise, it’s possible each error will be fixed independently of the others.

What I can say is that, based on my experience during this promotion, it is probably worth at least finding out whether your own stores are awarding gas points, whether or not the promotion appears in your circular.