this wasn't in the plan |but life is still pretty good

I imagine you've heard that the Kroger family of stores is offering a 10% bonus when you purchase a gift card. I decided to take advantage of this and purchase a $600 gift card today, because, well I buy groceries there and my money certainly isn't earning 10% anywhere else. One would assume since this has been plastered all over the internet (the personal finance blogs, at least) and in the store's ads and all over the store itself that the store's employees would know about the promotion and how to make such a transaction. You would assume wrong though. I waited for a really long time while the customer service girl tried to figure out how to correctly sell me the gift cards with the bonuses. The boys played peek-a-boo quite nicely for awhile and then quite not nicely for another while. Should you also have the pleasure of being the first person at your local store to want to purchase a gift card (and while It's not necessarily nice to tell the employees what to do, kindly suggesting something if they appear to not know what to do probably doesn't hurt) you may like to know the following:

• The cards are issued in $330 increments, thus if you want to purchase $600 worth (therefore getting a $60 bonus), you'll get two gift cards


• There appears to be a document explaining the steps necessary to make the transaction, it's perhaps beneficial to read through the entire thing before starting the process


• $330 needs to be put on the card, then when your rewards card is scanned, $30 will be taken off of the price you pay, so that you only pay $300 for a card that has a value of $330.

On a different note (yet in this case related), Discover Card has a great and on top of things fraud department and The Tall One and I finally succeeded in communicating effectively. Either making a $300 purchase at the grocery store or trying to do two of them in a row (the second one wouldn't go through) set off some red flags for the credit card people. I came home to a message on the answering machine asking us to call them. I called TTO to give him a head's up should he find an email from them and wonder what was going on. He had already received the email, called Discover and told them all was well. He said it was a good thing that we had talked about buying the gift card or he would have thought something was going on since I don't ever spend that much at once at the grocery store.