Shaw’s, among many other retailers, is offering a promotion where one can buy a $330 gift card at a cost of $300, or a multiple of those numbers, any number of times, the theory being that government economic stimulus payments are often in multiples of $300, and they’d rather you spend it at their store.
I suspect that their POS system would allow one to pay for a gift card using another gift card. Gift card is a method of payment, and the cashier likely doesn’t even see what kind of card you’re swiping to make payment. (They just enter in a $330 gift card activation with a $30 store discount.)
So, I think that it would be easy for one to buy a $330 card for $300, and then on one’s next trip (or right away if one thinks one can pass it by the customer service rep.), use $300 from that gift card to get another $330 card, meaning that you now have a $30 card and a $330 card, for $360 in total gift cards for a purchase of $300. This process should be repeatable as often as you think you can do it without them throwing you out of the store, leaving you with n $30 cards and 1 $330 card, all from an initial $300 expense.
Not only that, but since in Massachusetts the law says they must refund the balance of a gift card in cash if it’s at least 90% used, you should be able to convert all those $30 cards back into cash, more than covering your initial $300 expense.
Is there a flaw in my logic? Is their computer, customer service rep., or manager likely to notice? Is this doable, legal, moral, and/or ethical?
Almost universally, gift cards, gift certificates, and similar products cannot be used towards other gift cards, gift certificates, etc. The reason is to prevent somebody from chewing through a stores resources by spending a single cost-of-purchase to consume all of a store’s inventory of gift cards. It also shields them against schemes like the this.
That said, this is a large enough hole that I suspect the self-serve lines at the store probably have been configured to keep you from spending a gift card on a gift card, although it is possible the software hasn’t been updated yet.
There are no self-serve lines in the store in Sturbridge that we go to.
I think the promotional gift card needs to be purchased at Customer Service anyway.
But it hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t allow a gift card purchase via gift card just because they want to keep their inventory of plastic cards. I suppose I’ve never tried it.