In this episode of the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast, host Justin Vacula discusses traveling affordably using credit card points, miles, and rewards.
He chats with Gideon from the Free-quent Flyer blog about maximizing grocery rewards programs such as Safeway, including strategic tips for earning and redeeming points, managing multiple accounts, and transferring points to Alaska Airlines.
The episode also covers navigating credit card benefits, grocery store promotions, and recent changes in the rewards landscape, offering listeners practical insights to optimize their travel and spending strategies.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:03 Announcements and Upcoming Events
02:50 Interview with Gideon: Maximizing Grocery Rewards
04:56 Understanding Safeway’s Points System
08:46 Strategies for Redeeming Points
16:19 FreshPass Program Benefits
23:03 Navigating Gift Card Purchases
24:44 Navigating Multiple Payment Methods
26:03 American Express and Grocery Store Spending
27:09 Exploring Other Credit Card Options
27:42 Maximizing Rewards with MGM and Caesars Credit Cards
30:15 Alaska Airlines Transfer Opportunities
34:22 Dealing with Grocery Store Rewards
38:53 Handling Cashier Issues and Store Policies
40:31 Upcoming Trips and Credit Card Plans
42:42 Closing Thoughts and Future Events
Show notes:
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Rough Transcript:
Theme Song: [00:00:00] Travel at low cost with points and miles. Credit card rewards bring the smiles. Many adventures, tales to be told. Make and save money, the world will unfold. Fight the war on happiness, pick up the gold, the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast breaks a mold.
Justin Vacula: You’re listening to the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast. I’m your host, Justin Vacula, here to help you travel the world at next to no cost with credit card points, miles, benefits, and rewards.
Make money, save money, and take advantage of great deals. Thanks for joining me for today’s episode, maximizing Safeway for you program grocery rewards. I talked with Gideon, the writer of the Free-quent Flyer blog, about getting groceries [00:01:00] with rebates from gift card deals. Before today’s episode, some quick announcements.
Early bird ticket sales for Zorkfest 2025, a miles points and gambling event, are now live at zorkfest. travelzork. com. I spoke at the successful Zorkfest 2024 event. And hope to see you at Zork Fest 2025 in Las Vegas from December 5th through December 7th. I’m also looking forward to other events in 2025 and had a successful 2024 speaking at events with Award Travel 101, Frequent Traveler University, and both Chicago Seminars events.
If you’re an event organizer and would like to have me speak at your 2025 event, please contact me. Visit meetup. com slash Philly miles and points to RSVP for monthly greater Philadelphia travel credit miles and points meetups. I host in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. The next meetups are December 15th, 2024 [00:02:00] and January 26th, 2025.
Find a link in the show notes for more content between podcast episodes, follow hurdy gurdy travel podcast on Facebook and X. Formerly known as Twitter for bonus videos and community content. Subscribe to hurdy gurdy travel podcast on YouTube, follow Justin Vukula on Instagram for content, including trip photos, search hurdy gurdy travel on subscribestar.
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com on with today’s episode. Welcome to the show, Gideon.
Gideon: Great to be here. I’m a huge fan of your work and was really grateful when you came on to the manifesto on the [00:03:00] Milenomics podcast network. So glad to finally be able to return the favor.
Justin Vacula: Thanks. We’ll record on this and, and we’re going to talk about the Safeway Acme Albertsons Et cetera, program formerly known as just for you, maybe called just for you.
Well, number four, Y O U or you, the brand, the branding seems odd to me. Yeah, I think they trademarked basically every version of the words, just. Yeah, we have to get it right, of course, because we have the recurring public service announcement. It’s not Oceans Casino in Atlantic City. There’s no S. It’s just ocean.
So we definitely want to get it right today when we’re talking about the grocery rewards program, I’m recording from Atlantic city. This is the first episode on the go. So hopefully a decent quality for listeners, but decent quality, better than zero content, I think.
Gideon: Yeah, I I’m glad to hear you’re in AC.
I did the whole circuit [00:04:00] of all the signup bonuses when the ocean and. There are like two other casinos open there, like, it’s the weekend. A lot of us went out there and earned a lot of matching.
Justin Vacula: Yes, the miles and points pilgrimage. All the status matching fun. All right, to start, Can you please blog where people can find you online, because we’re going to be referencing a blog post that you had authored recently.
Uh, frequentwirebook.
Gideon: com, google it, it’ll show up, and you can find my, uh, 46 glorious podcast episodes on the Myelonomics Podcast Network.
Justin Vacula: All right. And if you could spell that for listeners, frequent flyer, you spell it with two E’s. Yeah. I always easy to
Gideon: smell, but it is not easy to sell it. Yeah. So it’s a, the free Quinn flyer on because the whole thing started with a ebook that I wrote now 15
Justin Vacula: years.
All right. So if we can get into the grocery [00:05:00] rewards, can you give us basic rundown of points earning at the Safeway brand stores?
Gideon: Safeway or like the just for you family of brands has changed a lot over the years. It used to be that they had pretty frequent deals, I negative cops, Visa cards. So you’d get like 15 back when you only paid 12 and activation fees.
So, that was a really popular manufacturing spending opportunity while to bonus earnings through the just for you, specifically for you, or the offers for you rewards program. And the current sweet spot that they’re using is the Zillions or Ziffs gift cards, which they’ve been offering bonus points on probably like three of the last six weeks, I think at this point.
And So F the sweet spot right now for earning huge [00:06:00] balances in the program. Obviously the real value comes when you redeem the points, not when you earn
Justin Vacula: the F. Okay. So if they run a promotion saying something like earn 10 times points on zillions or ZIF gift cards, what does that actually mean? So this is a little
Gideon: bit tricky and the first couple of times you do it, you probably want to inspect your receipt to make sure that all the numbers add up.
This is me. How it works is that. All non Visa and MasterCard gift cards at Safeway always earn two points per dollar. So when these promotions come around and they say you’re going to earn 10x or you’re going to earn 12x. What they’re really saying is that you’re going to earn eight additional points on top of the two base points or ten additional points.
And then most Saturdays I’d be probably like this. 9 out of 10 Saturdays, they also run a promotion that does stack with those learning [00:07:00] opportunities, which is 4. 4. Points per dollar on gift cards. But again, they’re, they’re calculating that based on the two base points that gift cards are every day of the week, plus two Saturday bonus points.
So when you stack those, you don’t end up getting 14 points per dollar. You’re getting two base points plus eight bonus points plus two bonus points. So that’s the like big stack that’s available most Saturdays at most safeways on the East coast at least.
Justin Vacula: Okay. So America really loves math. If we were to buy a 500 zillions card and we were to enter our store loyalty account, we have the app set up.
All that is set up. How many points do we earn on this 10 X promotion?
Gideon: So on a 10 X you’ll earn 5, 000 total points, 2000 base points and 8, And then on a Saturday when they’re running the Forex promo, [00:08:00] then you can earn 6, 000 total points. And that’s 2, 000 base points, 8, 000 bonus points for the week long promotion, and then 2, 000 more bonus
Justin Vacula: points for the Saturday promotion.
Okay. So listeners really want to pay attention to when those promotions are running and maybe some good sources might be DoctorOfCredit. com. I used to promote gcgalore. com, they closed shop. So now it’s gcanywhere. com is a similar site that’s popped up. Yeah,
Gideon: on the earning side, yeah, those zillions and ziffs promotions that have been, uh, coming around for about two or three in the last five weeks.
Those are great earnings opportunities. Obviously the value only comes when you redeem the points.
Justin Vacula: Right. So if we were to earn 6, 000 points, so they’ve changed the program, as you mentioned earlier, they’ve added a lot of zeros to make things complicated or to seem like you have a lot more than you actually do.
It’s my understanding that 1, [00:09:00] 200 points gets you 20 worth of groceries. For
Gideon: a long time, a lot of people treated the gas redemptions as the most valuable redemptions. But you raise a really interesting point because I don’t own a car. Periodically, I’ll rent a car when we’re on the road, when we’re traveling.
And it’s pretty unusual to find a car with a gas tank larger than 12 gallons. So if your maximum gas savings, redemption is 1 per gallon, and you’re only buying 12 gallons of gas, maximum, like if you’ve ridden the tank to the absolute zero, then you’re not getting as much value as you think you are, or imagining up to 35 gallon Hummer or something.
So that 1200 points for 20 off groceries is. I think the most valuable redemption for most [00:10:00] people, most of the time, I will say that you have to be conscious of Safeway’s prices. We live in an area that has both Safeway and Giant stores, and I constantly find Giant to be a little bit cheaper. And I take that into account when I say I’m getting 20 in free groceries for 1200 just for you points.
I’m not really getting 20 in groceries. I’m getting 20 in groceries. 80 in groceries if I’d shopped at the giant. I think that’s something that’s worth taking into account if you take this coop modding game
Justin Vacula: seriously. So 6, 000 points divided by 1200 would be five redemptions. And each redemption would be 20 in groceries.
So for a 500 zillions card, if you were to have the 4x and 10x promotion, the rebate you would get is a 100 rebate on that 500 gift card. So that’s actually pretty good. If you could run that on both of the promotions, you’re also using a credit card, of course. [00:11:00] To buy the gift card, you’re getting the grocery multiplier points there.
Maybe you’re working on a signup bonus or a high spend goal. So I think stacking all the things can get you a really effective rebate on groceries here. The way I think about
Gideon: it is it’s free manufactured spend. I can get a hundred dollars of free groceries and I can resell a zillion card for 400. Then I get the credit card spend for free.
And if I could do better than that, and I usually do better than that, then I’m even better off. I, I think a healthy way to go into it is to say, this is free manufacturing spend, I’m getting all of my money back, plus I’m getting my credit card warrants.
Justin Vacula: Okay, so you bring up the reselling on the gift cards.
So I think one of the higher value cards that can be converted from these zillions cards, because these are online convertible cards, So if you were to convert a [00:12:00] 500 zillions card to something like Home Depot and sell the Home Depot for 90 percent face value, you’d be getting 450 back on that. So it’s like taking a 50 loss, but you’re getting the 100 in groceries and you’re also getting the credit card reward and spend.
So the numbers don’t lie on that one. That seems to be a great opportunity. Yeah, exactly. Free
Gideon: or ideally negative cost. Manufactured spent because a lot of those redemption options for the zillions cards are that you might use in real life. So I, uh, I don’t know if this is embarrassing or not, but I redeemed one for a bunch of Uber Eats and DoorDash credit, and I’m getting basically face value for a 500 card that I also earned 100 in groceries, and I also earned 3 percent plus in rewards on the credit card.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Pretty good.
Justin Vacula: Yeah, so first we [00:13:00] might look for personal use cases that if you were to actually be buying things at Home Depot, like gas containers for your gas or other items, then you want to use the personal use side first, Airbnb, I’ve also looked, that’s one of the conversion options too.
But then once you’ve capped out on the personal use, then you’re going to look into the reselling. And I’ve had guests on the show before from cardcenter. cc is one gift card reselling site. And And Taylor from QCGC. io, as they’ll post rates and call for cards when these promotions run. So when the promotions run, they notify you and say, Hey, we’re buying 500 Home Depot cards at 90 percent face.
So that can be a good opportunity for these promotions with Acme, Safeway and the partnering stores. Yeah, absolutely.
Gideon: And like, the more involved you are in those networks, the, the better resale value you’re going to get. I mentioned before we started recording that I always like to [00:14:00] use just like the card cash, not logged in, no executive status, resale rate, just because I want as many people as possible to know how good of an opportunity it is, even though if you do jump through all those hoops, it can be an even better
Justin Vacula: opportunity, the way you described it.
Alright, and we talked about using the 1200 points for 20 in groceries. Can you walk us through how you are to convert these points and get the 20 worth?
Gideon: Yeah, this is a pretty, pretty important question because the highest value redemption if you are redeeming for groceries is going to be at that 1, 200.
20 level, um, and I believe you’re allowed to redeem four of those per week, uh, per account, and so this is as good a time as any to say that you should have. An [00:15:00] unlimited number of just for you accounts, you can use the gmail period trick that you can use the same gmail address and just put a period in between the different letters of your email address.
For phone numbers, they don’t do any validation of phone numbers, so you can just iterate your own phone number. If your phone number ends in 01, you could have 10 accounts, 02, And that that is going to increase your flexibility a lot in terms of those redemptions. Now, obviously, for plenty of people, 80 a week and free groceries is all the groceries that they need that week.
Also, there are people, I don’t know, like caterers or people who are trying to donate groceries to a free kitchen or a free pantry or something like that, need to know that there’s no limit to the number of Just For You accounts that you can have. And that’s an easy, simple way to start scaling your rewards very
Justin Vacula: quickly.[00:16:00]
And once you’ve capped, or if you’ve capped the 20 conversions, they also have rates for it. lesser conversions, but you’re not going to get the maximum cents per point in that. So you might want to wait until the future week if you’re just operating on one account, or as you said, you could run the multiple accounts.
I used to have multiple accounts, but I stopped running multiple accounts because I’ve enrolled in the FreshPass program. So the points don’t expire. Can you talk a little bit about the FreshPass program? FreshPass is great
Gideon: if you’re going to make one. Big swing at one promotion. And I, I have done this in the past of just earn a hundred thousand points or 200, 000 points during single, just for you promotion.
Then you’re going to need the fresh pass because the main benefit of the fresh pass is that it keeps your points from expiring. I, so I have fresh pass on one account and I frankly see these [00:17:00] promotions coming around so often. To be clear on expiration of points, they expire at the end of the month after you earn them.
If you earn points at the beginning of October, you have until the end of November to redeem them, which is a lot of weeks. It’s a lot of those 20 redemptions. But if you are going to make one big swing for the fences, then FreshPass is a no brainer. It’s a 99 a year unless you get on one of the many promotions they have to bring you down to 45 or 50 bucks.
Justin Vacula: We’re recording December 9th and I was in store, I saw on the receipt 50 off for the subscription as a Black Friday fall promo. And you mentioned before the show that there are a lot of American Express offers where if you enroll in FreshPass. With a certain American Express card and offer that you might get something like 30 off.
Gideon: Yeah, exactly. And I’m sure they’re identical promotions on Chase and Bank of America and US Bank. So [00:18:00] if you keep your eyes open, you can get Fresh Fast very cheaply. But I actually, I know you’re a big fan of the Fresh Fast benefits themselves. You’re going for a free Starbucks and stuff like that. Well, what did you get out of Fresh Fast?
Justin Vacula: Yeah, it’s once a month that you can get a 5 in store credit with FreshPass, and then you get a grande drink at Starbucks for only 2. So I stack the 5 offer work with the 2 drink, and somehow the math ends up being about 1. 50 that I owe when I get a spinach feta wrap and the drink. So then I use Starbucks gift card balance in the Starbucks app.
To pay for the rest. So that’s how I get the 5 out every month because you’re paying the 99 a year. If there are no promos and you’re getting 5 back a month. So if you use that 5 every month, you’re definitely reducing the cost and the points not expiring is really [00:19:00] worthwhile to me. Yeah. It’s
Gideon: a, that’s a great way to do it on a, like per account basis.
It’s hard to,
Justin Vacula: lots of visits throughout the month. Yeah. And it can get. You get a bit tedious to keep track of, I imagine. And I don’t think the grocery rewards stack. So if you were to redeem the 1200 points for the 20 and then add the 5 reward, I don’t believe rewards can stack in the same transaction.
So you’d have to use separate transactions. Oh, let’s do the peanut butter and the bananas separately, and then do all this other thing as one order. So the program’s a little bit eccentric because in the past, as you mentioned earlier, you were just able to use multiple redemptions in the same transaction.
And that was a lot easier.
Gideon: Yeah. And
Justin Vacula: to be clear, they have cut
Gideon: down on a lot of the abuses that we’re doing. But I do believe that if you have two 20 rewards clipped, that you can
Justin Vacula: use them on the same transaction, I believe. Oh, okay. All right. So listeners can [00:20:00] try that. And we didn’t talk about the basics of how to redeem me.
So I’m looking at the app. This is the AFMI app and I’m going into rewards on the upper right on the home screen. I click on the button rewards. It’s saying the points balance that I have. And then there’s a list. This is grocery rewards. So this one says 20 off your next purchase of 20 or more. Use 1200 points.
So if I click that, it’s considered a clipped reward. Then I need to go to, at the bottom of the screen, my list. Refresh the my list. And then it’s going to say the 20 is off and you have to hit the check mark. Next to that’s been my experience. You have to do all this in the app that you can’t just do it in store.
Gideon: Yes, that’s 100 percent correct. Every, everything having to do with rewards has to happen either online or in the app. Nobody at the store can help you in any way. Have your app like that up correctly. When you [00:21:00] walk in the door, I have clipped coupons, like literally seconds before checkout and they are correctly processed.
But a lot of the safe ways around here don’t have very good cell reception. So I know,
Justin Vacula: and I see another option here. It says automatically convert points into cash off at checkout. Every hundred points will turn into a dollar off, but this seems to be a really bad deal because you would need 2000 points to get 20 off in this scenario versus using 1200 points to get 20 off groceries.
Gideon: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Sucker’s bet. And if you don’t like that expression, then is an option for liquidating the remain balance in your account. If you only have a few hundred points and you can’t get to a higher value reduction.
Justin Vacula: Oh, we could be judgmental, just save your points for a future visit and, uh, wait for that 20 to come back for the 1200 points, because otherwise it seems to be [00:22:00] lighting 8 on fire when you could just wait for a future transaction.
So you did raise an interesting
Gideon: point that I was hoping we’d get to when you said that you opened the Acme app, because something that is not at all obvious, but is extremely important to understand about the 4U rewards ecosystem, every. Login you have is actually 15 or 16 different counts because of the way that Safeway and Acme and Albertsons are structured.
Each of those is siloed, but it’s attached to the same phone number and email address. And that’s a really important thing to know when it comes to maximizing the value of more eccentric.
Justin Vacula: All right. And we’ll get into a little bit of that later in the show with Alaska airlines. So continue listening for that eccentric opportunity.
But before we get into [00:23:00] that, talk about the acquisition of the gift cards. In my experience, you can only get a 500 gift card per visit at the same register. If you attempt to do more than 500, or if you attempt to do multiple transactions, In my experience, the second card wouldn’t get activated properly.
That
Gideon: sounds like a region specific thing. But, very many, multiple, billion, yes, gift cards during these promotions without encountering that problem. What is true is that each card requires a scan from the manager’s badge. So, I normally keep it to a minimum because it’s very annoying to them to have to scan their badge every time I buy a card.
That is not a hard coded problem that you’re encountering, that’s a manager problem here.
Justin Vacula: And it’s my understanding you can’t use self checkout, or if you try to use self checkout, they still need to do the override at self checkout.
Gideon: Yes, they do, they do need to do the override, [00:24:00] and that is why it is important to find, uh, A variety of stores.
Which have employees that are willing to assist you on transactions like that. Because if you, if your stores are not willing to assist you on transactions like that, then they are going to be very long, boring trips to the grocery.
Justin Vacula: Ah, so then it’s going to be a tedious 500 per stop. And you’d have to possibly do a world tour to accumulate lots of points.
Exactly. We all know cashiers also like making up the rules. So are there, are there actual. Rules here that I’m seeing, you can’t do multiple transactions. You’re seeing that you could, but they just have to be willing to do it. Do they have to go to a different register? To do the second transaction, what’s going on?
Partly that is the experience
Gideon: of the Albertson’s Safeway chain, acquiring so many different grocery stores with so many different cultures and so many different [00:25:00] attitudes. And partly it’s just lack of training. Nobody knows what the system could do until they try it. Your job a lot of the time is to try to convince them
Justin Vacula: to try.
And on the acquisition side, in my experience, if I go to customer service, I can ask them to. Split tender to use multiple payment methods for the gift cards. So typically I’d do something like 299 and 43 cents on one card, something below 300, and then put the rest on another card. The reason I do this is because sometimes there’d be fraud alerts for those exactly 500 transactions and the spend looks more organic or legitimate.
If I make it something like 299, 54, it doesn’t scream gift card. But it’s also my understanding that Safeway stores send more detailed transaction data. So if you have a new American Express card that you’re working on a sign up bonus with, maybe it wouldn’t be best to use that one at Safeway, Acme, etc.
But maybe use more [00:26:00] seasoned cards for those transactions.
Gideon: Yeah, I don’t think we need to beat around the bush. American Express has been cracking down on grocery store manufacturing spend, um, So American Express cards are not the best cards to use to manufacture spend to grocery stores. No, no two ways about it.
There are a lot of other options out there for, uh,
Justin Vacula: manufacturing spend to grocery stores. Personally, I’ve used older personal gold cards. I haven’t had any issues with those, but I still split tender. I still make the transaction amounts different rather than 500, 500, 500, 500 or 505, 95, 506, 95, some, something like that.
Gideon: Yeah, and it’s also worth mentioning here that just the co branded cards are not as sensitive as the membership rewards cards. Hilton co branded cards have been having Some issues for the last couple of months at grocery stores, but they’re much lower risk than using, yeah, like an American Express Gold card, [00:27:00] where you have to take more precautions to mask your transaction.
Justin Vacula: Are there other credit cards that you find yourself using for these transactions? I love the U. S. Bank
Gideon: Lexmark’s Travel Rewards card. I think it was probably the first travel hacking credit card I ever got because it used to award bonus points on evil loans. The, uh, Distributed Third World Loan Service, it was coded as a charity, so it offered bonus points on all the loans you had.
So I still love them. For grocery stores, if I pay, like, less than half a cent a point, or earning huge grocery store rewards, and I’m getting three cents a point, yep, that’s a whole run
Justin Vacula: for me. And of course, the MGM MasterCard, I really like. As I’m aiming to spend my way to Platinum status to re qualify for MGM Platinum status as the status matching we mentioned earlier is getting more difficult.
That Wyndham and Caesar’s escalated the War on [00:28:00] Happiness and it appears that there’s no automatic matching back to Caesar’s Diamond. So the MGM Mastercard will get you 2x tier points. And two X in comps or free play when making grocery store transactions. So this can be a nice way to earn rewards and status in the process.
Gideon: I looked at that for a long time, but didn’t they, the status that you could get, see stars or whatever, the, the top tier status is
Justin Vacula: not on the MGM MasterCard. The MGM MasterCard is unlimited tier, but the Caesar’s rewards visa, you get tier for signing up and then you get bonus tier, but that bonus tier. Is indeed capped.
You can only get 5, 000 bonus tier per year with the credit card for reaching the high spend goal. So unfortunately you can’t spend your way to seven stars. I would absolutely spend my way to seven stars if I had the opportunity, but I could spend my way with the MGM master card, getting MGM platinum status.[00:29:00]
Gideon: Good to know. I love going to Vegas, but I I’m so fallen out of all the tier matching system since last time I went. So I don’t even know what you consider to show up at first.
Justin Vacula: Oh, All right. And for other grocery store credit cards, the city strata premier three X thank you points. You mentioned us bank.
If people have the altitude reserve credit card, that can be one, although I’ve also heard some rumors that us bank can be difficult, let’s say with the manufacturer spending or gift card spending. So if you were to do it there, then maybe he would do that split tender. Do the less than 300. So it doesn’t seem as obvious.
Maybe that could be okay. At least that lower amounts.
Gideon: Yeah, I w I will say about us bank. I grew up in Montana and us bank has the plains and mountain state bank in principle. So my first CDs account with us banks. So I’ve had a relationship with them 35 years. [00:30:00] And I’ve never had any fraud problems, but I understand that is the reputation have, and I may just have been grandfathered in, but I do a lot of spend U.
S. bank and they treat me very well over the years.
Justin Vacula: All right, let’s move in then to the Alaska Airlines transfers that there are also speculation that you can transfer your rewards to Alaska Airlines instead of redeeming for groceries. Maybe you can redeem for currency with the Alaska Airlines program.
Gideon: Yeah, so I’m glad that one of your listeners sent in this suggestion, but it’s also like a little bit sad because transfer opportunity is getting a little bit fragmented. So let me explain it to the outset. This is something that a lot of people have kept pretty close to their vest because it was such an amazing opportunity.
But if you changed your zip [00:31:00] code, In your for you, safer for you, Albertsons, for you, Acme for you right out to a zip code in Alaska, then you are given the opportunity to redeem 2200 for you points for 3,500 Alaska mileage plan miles on how you value them. That is pretty close to the 1200 to $20 redemption your home market, except that Alaska Miles are.
Potentially very valuable. This opportunity has been going on for at least two or three years. And most people have just not been talking about it in public. Like I, I shared on my newsletter. Like I, I tried to get as many people involved in as possible. We don’t write about it online, but those transfers are actually getting pretty janky.
So the last two weeks of October transfers just didn’t go through. And the November transfers. [00:32:00] We’re, like, basically hit or miss to Ben Gunn when you submitted the request and stuff, so the miles are still trickling into Alaska from Safeway, and I still think it’s a good opportunity and I’m gonna keep doing it, but it is not.
The opportunity was like two years ago where you could earn a lot of just for you points and then redeem them for a lot of Alaska miles, which was when the sweet spot was alive and well. So it’s still, the opportunity is still available. The opportunity is still alive. It’s just not quite as sweet as it was
Justin Vacula: a
Gideon: year or two ago.
Justin Vacula: Might there be any shutdown risk for this? Oh, look, you installed this app from the local cars. Supermarket chain changed your zip code, but then you’re making all these transactions in PA and New Jersey. Are they paying attention to that at all? Is it triggering some kind of red flag in the system that’s leading people to get shut down?
100 percent [00:33:00] of
Gideon: the shutdowns that I have seen are people who changed their zip codes back and forth from their home zip code to Alaska. There is no need to do that, which is why I stressed earlier on in our conversation. How you need to have just a ton of accounts and if you have a ton of accounts, then you never need to change the zip code back and forth.
And I think that if you do change the zip code back and forth, then you will get targeted for shut down. But that’s just a simple mistake they do not need to make. You just have a separate account linked to your Alaska mileage plan account where you earn bonus points and then you redeem them for Alaska miles and they never needs to touch anything
Justin Vacula: else.
Oh, okay. So user error in that case, you could even sign up originally, never change it and just have it as a brand new account rather than messing with an existing account.
Gideon: A lot of people are making unforced errors [00:34:00] by business, not making unforced errors.
Justin Vacula: Yes, make a business decision to not make an error that could have been avoided.
Gideon: But Alaska miles are incredibly valuable, so I’m still enjoying the like rundown of this operation just because. Be able to redeem Alaska vi’s short haul American Airlines. Flights the best deal of
Justin Vacula: Vegas right now. Uh, and if you’re not doing the conversions to Alaska Airlines, you end up with a lot of these grocery rewards.
Now, you could pay the annual fee for Fresh Pass, which I think is a great value because the points never expire. But if you don’t have fresh pass, you have to use. These rewards, you end up with the first world problem of too many grocery rewards. You have to go supermarket sweeping for obscure things that I’ve gotten with other programs like Crest White Strips and printer paper and bathroom supplies.
What do you find yourself getting with these grocery rewards, especially if you have a lot of them? So, saffron
Gideon: [00:35:00] threads are very expensive and don’t take up very much space. You So whenever I have too many Gershwin rewards, I bring home Saffron Threads. So yeah, the Spice Isle is your friend. Ah, when you have too many Gershwin rewards.
They don’t take up very much space, and if you buy the most expensive thing on the rack, then you get to 20
Justin Vacula: pretty
Gideon: fast.
Justin Vacula: Okay. And what about the maybe housewares aisle? Do you find electronics items at your stores that you end up just getting blenders or rice cookers? What might that look like?
Gideon: Now, a lot of our grocery stores here in the District of Columbia are pretty small and tucked away.
So they’re not really like department stores or department store grocery stores like you’d find in the suburbs. So yeah, like toilet paper is always a great option. Um, But again, want to return to something I said earlier, often stuff is marked up when you buy it in the grocery store. So don’t [00:36:00] think that you’re getting 20 in value.
You’re getting 17 in value because they add three bucks for the grocery store market, dish soap,
Justin Vacula: sponges. I’ve also seen sushi that they would have. Sushi in a certain area, they have hoagies or subs, depending on your region. You might find items in the Starbucks cafe that aren’t overpriced. And sometimes some discounted food items, the deli.
So you can go in some of these places, some of these places have microwaves, so you can buy some ready to heat items they have, not ready to eat, ready to heat. And put these items in the microwaves and eat on the go for another option.
Gideon: Yeah, and when you’re racking up 80 in grocery store rewards a week, freelance a little bit and buy some random stuff.
But it is important to pay some attention to the restrictions on those things. Often they do exclude dairy. If you have a 22 basket, but [00:37:00] 5 of it is the organic milk. Then the coupon might not trigger. So there are things to be aware of and you do
Justin Vacula: want to read the terms and conditions. Okay. Anything else about the rewards program that we didn’t cover that you would like to mention?
Gideon: No, I think it covers most of it. I w I would just stress open a bunch of accounts, keep them separate and experiment with them separately. And then if one gets shut down, it’s no big deal. Like. I feel like a lot of people who were shut down due to the Alaska transfers were trying to do everything from one account.
And I think that is an error that will get you caught eventually every single time.
Justin Vacula: I’d also like to mention that acne in my area in Pennsylvania, New Jersey. They sell DraftKings gift cards, and the DraftKings gift cards give points as well, but in my experience, they didn’t give bonus points when they ran the 4x all or most gift cards promotion.
But you can still buy physical DraftKings gift cards in stores. [00:38:00] Unfortunately, I’ve only seen 50 and 25 denominations. So it’s a little bit of America loves scratching, and you’re going to have these dusty, dirty hands. Afterwards, compared to buying a hundred dollar denominations elsewhere, but you can play online blackjack with these online sports betting I’ve covered in other episodes.
So that’s an interesting thing. If you’re not getting into the gift card reselling, you can get these cards for personal use.
Gideon: I think that a number of people also like the redemptions for gift of college cards, which you can redeem and do a lot of different playouts. That’s another.
Justin Vacula: Yeah. If you could find the gift of college cards, those are.
As common, but maybe they’re at your store near you and some cashiers making up rules, of course, cashiers might claim, Oh, you can’t use credit to buy gift cards, or we’re a cash only store. How do you deal with these situations? I leave
Gideon: the way I look at it. The way I’ve always looked at it is that the, the [00:39:00] cashiers in my stores are not working for me.
They are my coworkers. And if. One of my coworkers, he’s having a bad day and he doesn’t want to do something the way that I want to do it, wish her a good day, and I walk out of the store. I have never seen any benefit to confronting a cashier or a manager about anything. You’re having a bad day, I’m not going to make it my bad day, I’m leaving.
That’s my attitude, Prince. Because yours, and obviously that works better for me ’cause I live in a big city that has a lot of storage, so I have a lot of options. But make it a big scene and ruining somebody’s day and making, making yourself memorable is almost never a positive,
Justin Vacula: a positive play.
Thankfully, at my local stores, I see signs that say that credit cards are accepted. And if a cashier were to claim something like I couldn’t use the credit, then I’d say, Oh, there’s a sign right here that says that I could use credit or we [00:40:00] get a second opinion about this. But thankfully, my local stores have been cool and they’ve allowed me to use credit.
At most, they would ask, Oh, we need to see your card and ID. So I present that information and do the transaction. So I’ve had a good run.
Gideon: You just reminded me of the time that I took a picture of the sign saying, We accept Visa and MasterCard payments for these gift
Justin Vacula: cards. All right, good. So closing out.
That’s the Safeway Rewards Program. But what about you? Do you have any trips coming in 2025?
Gideon: Back out to
Justin Vacula: Oregon
Gideon: to spend some time on the coast and spend some time in Portland and pretty excited about that. And I’m thinking about going back to Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic for the film festival again in 2025, which has just been a really fun time over the last few years.
Another miles and points fuel trip, correct?
Justin Vacula: Aer
Gideon: Lingus will fly us though in Alaska miles. [00:41:00]
Justin Vacula: Oh, a safe way, your way to Europe. Exactly. Cool. Any new cards, any new credit cards coming for 2025 or cards you plan on applying for?
Gideon: Yeah, I don’t know how much I
Justin Vacula: should
Gideon: talk about this, but I have a legacy Chase Inc.
Plus card, which has the 50, 000 annual limit on, uh, bonus office fly store spend. That is getting easier and easier to hit. So I am thinking about chasing cash to add another 25, 000 to that 5X
Justin Vacula: earning limit. Yes, the answer to everything is indeed more credit cards. And I currently have three chasing caches.
I’ve gotten the different flavors of ink cards. And then after one year, I converted them to Chasing caches to have more of the five x and even staples near me have started to sell FanDuel and DraftKings gift cards. [00:42:00] So even when they’re not running the C free MasterCard gift card promotions, you can just go in and get the DraftKings and FanDuel as an option.
But of course, others are gonna be losing their way to the finish line. But I think there was a devaluation there in that one of those pathways has. Disappeared in the last day or two that now you’d be buying general goods rather than office supplies, uh, with certain features. I’m glad I almost, uh, hit my limit
Gideon: already.
Justin Vacula: Always be spending, always be liquidating, do not
Gideon: delay. Yeah, no, I, I did flew my way to a higher global status than I planned on making the most of it in 2025. All right. Very good. And how can people find you online? I am at prequinflyerbook. com. It’s plugged into Google. All right. Any other thoughts, anything else you’d want to bring up?
No, I would just stress again that as exhilarating as it feels for all groceries [00:43:00] to be free forever, it still does pay to comparison
Justin Vacula: shop. Yes. This spice aisle and the, the crest white strips too. They also have their store brand white strips. So that was one liquidation option for me too. That was pretty funny.
I found t shirts, I found hoodies. I found all kinds of things, random local high school teams. With their apparel and gear. So I had the upper Moreland golden bears t shirt and someone approached me one day. Oh, you went to high school there. No, I just got the shirt. Let’s go upper Moreland. Yeah.
Philadelphia eels, Penn state merch, Philly’s merch. I’ve seen at the local acne stores. So there’s a world of rewards waiting for you. All right. Thanks for coming on the show today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for future episodes. Early bird ticket sales for Zorkfest 2025 miles, points and gambling event are now live at Zorkfest.
travelzork. com. I spoke with [00:44:00] a successful Zorkfest 2024 event and hope to see you as Zorkfest 2025 in Las Vegas from December 5th through December 7th. I’m also looking forward to other events in 2025 and had a successful 2024 speaking at events with Award Travel 101. Frequent traveler, university, and both Chicago seminars events.
If you’re an event organizer and like to have me speak at your 2025 event, please contact me. Visit meetup. com slash Philly miles and points to RSVP for monthly greater Philadelphia travel credit miles and points meetups by hosting Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. The next meetups are December 15th, 2024 and January 26th, 2025.
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