Can you buy gift cards at grocery store to receive a higher reward rate?
If you go to a grocery store and purchase retail gift cards along with other products, and you pay with a credit card, your credit card company generally does not know what you spent the money on; they don't get an itemized receipt.* If this is the case with your rewards card, then yes, you would get the cashback reward on the gift cards, because all the credit card company knows is that you spent $100 at the grocery store; they don't know (or care, really) that $50 of it was for an Olive Garden gift card. This, of course, should be fairly easy to test.  Buy the gift card, wait for your statement, and see if they included the purchase when calculating your rewards. * Note: I don't have an American Express card, but from some quick googling I see that it is possible that American Express does actually receive itemized billing details on your purchases from some merchants.  If your grocery store is sending this data to AmEx, it is possible that the gift cards could be excluded from rewards.  But again, I suggest you just test it out and see. In a similar situation I wrote about How I Made $4,000+ on a Cash Back Credit Card Offer. The total was actually $4550, and was from an insane offer from a new credit card my bank advertised. 10% cash back on all spending during the first 90 days. I wondered if gift card purchases counted, and more than store cards, I saw that Visa gift cards with a $500 value sold for a $4.95 fee. A 1% hit.  It would have been foolish to load up, and realize that they were somehow excluded, so I bought 2 and followed the transaction on line. When I saw the 10% credit, I went full steam, and bought these, $2000 at a time, as that was the limit CVS imposed. In the end, I stopped at $50,000. (And the bank killed the online offer about $25K into this, but still honored my 90 days) Yes, I had to make payments mid cycle to avoid the card limit ($20K), but in the end, the bit of effort paid off. It took a bit over a year and a half to burn through them. In hindsight, I'd do it for $100K if the opportunity came up. Cash in the bank is earning near zero.    TL:DR Make a small purchase and confirm your card gives you the bonus you expect. "Understand that buying a Starbucks gift card at the grocery store to receive 6% back on your coffee rather than 6% back on your groceries is an exploit of a flaw in the benefits program, not a feature.  It's definitely not a blanket yes or no answer, the only way to find out is to try. Separately, I don't know why you would find this ""concerning.""  This will vary greatly between merchants and cards.  There will always be new points churning exploits, they don't last forever and you can't expect every customer service rep to be well versed in methods employed to juice cardmember programs. Hell, a number of years ago one person figured out that he could buy rolls of $1 coins from the US treasury with free shipping and no additional fees.  This guy was literally buying thousands of dollars of cash each month to deposit and pay his credit card bill; completely against the terms of the treasury program for distributing the $1 coins.  A number of people had their cards and points/cash back revoked for that one." "(I agree with the answers above; would just like to make a couple of additional points.) It's a good and simple strategy to try it out with a small amount as suggested by @JoeTaxpayer♦. It's also generally safe to assert that card issuers currently don't receive or actively look at itemized transaction details. But that does not mean they cannot in the future. Some stores utilize level 3 data processing, which tells the card issuers exactly what you bought in a transaction. An example of level 3 data being utilized to reject rewards is with Discover, which announced a 10% cashback reward for any transactions made with Apple Pay last year. It later introduced an additional term to exclude gift card purchases. And this has been verified to be effective - no more reward on gift card purchases; clawback of cashback on existing gift card transactions. As far as I know, Amex does receive and look at some level 3 data retrospectively. That does not necessarily mean they will claw back your cashback after initially rewarding the 6%. But it might show up if you ever trigger an account review, and be used as evidence of your ""abuse"" of the program (which BTW is defined rather subjectively). There has been many cases of account shutdowns because of this. Card issuers are also trying to do a better job preventing ""abuses"" by proactively setting caps on rewards (as opposed to closing those accounts afterwards and taking the rewards away altogether). Given the trend in recent years, I have to speculate that at some point the card issuers would put clear language in the terms against gift card purchase and enforce it effectively (if they haven't already). This reward game is constantly changing. It's good while it lasts. Just be prepared and don't get surprised when things go south." I actually just did that with my Chase Freedom card. They rotate categories every 3 months, and from April-June it was 5% back at grocery stores.  So I bought a ton of gas cards and got my 5% back.  Next I figured out I would be clever and buy a ton of store gift cards (grocery gift cards) right at the end of the quarter, then use those in the future to purchase gas cards.  Well, I just tried that a couple days ago and discovered the store refuses to sell a gift card if you're paying with a gift card!  So now I'm stuck with $1,000 in grocery cards until I use them in actual grocery purchases haha One of the things about this grocery store is they partner with a gas station on their rewards program.  They offer 10 cents off a gallon with every $100 spent in store, and they double it to 20 cents off a gallon if you buy $100 in gift cards.  Then on the back of the receipt is a coupon for 10 cents off per gallon -- which they double on Tuesdays.  Unfortunately I think I'm one of the only people that takes this much advantage of the program  :-/ Side note: I actually just changed the billing cycle of my Chase Freedom card to end on the 24th of the month.  That way I can charge a bunch of rewards in the final 6-7 days of the quarter.  And if I have a $0 balance on the 24th, my bill isn't due for 7 weeks -- interest free!  And Chase Freedom has never cared if you purchase gift cards with their quarterly rewards program.  I also gave them a courtesy email giving the specific store and $$$ amount that was going to be charged, and of course they still called me with a 'fraud alert'...
In the case of reward cards, different cards may offer different rewards for different kind of purchases. For example, in the UK, one of the Amex cards offers 1.25% cashback on all purchases, whereas one of the Santander cards offers 3% on fuel, 2% or 1% on certain other transactions, and nothing on others. Of course, you then have to remember to use the right card! Another reason is that a person may use a card for a while, build up a good credit limit, and then move to a different card (perhaps because it has better rewards, or a lower interest rate, etc) without cancelling the first. If it costs nothing to keep the first card, then it can be useful to have it as a spare. "Imagine two restaurants. One has prices 15% higher than the other, and the owner pays this 15% to his wait staff in the form of higher wages. The other has lower prices, but the average customer gifts 15% to their waiter. Clearly, in the first restaurant, the 15% the wait staff receives is taxable income. It is traditional salary. What legitimate, economic justification is their for treating the second restaurant any differently? Imagine a grocery store in a small town that offered long-time customers a ""pay nothing"" option but made it clear that they'd be subject to social ostracism and no longer welcome in the store if they didn't gift 85% of the usual cost of the items. The customers would save on sales tax and the grocer would argue that all that money was gifts, not income. Of course this doesn't work. The IRS, and the laws, don't care very much about what you call things. They care about the underlying economic reality. If the money was part of the payment for the services rendered, regardless of how it was delivered, what the parties called it, or whether the obligation to pay was legal or social, it's still a payment for the service and it's still taxable. You would have to be able to argue to the IRS that it really was a gift and wasn't any form of payment for the service received. Otherwise, it's just a scheme to evade taxes." Each company that has an account with the credit card network has to classify themselves as a particular type of business.  The credit card company uses that classification to catagorize the transaction on your statement. If you buy a T-shirt at a grocery, amusement park, gas station, or resturant; the transaction will be labeled by the vendor type.  Look at recent credit card statements, even if they are from different cards, to see how the stores you want to know about are classified. "What you are doing is neither one.  You are simply watching to make sure you don't overdraw, which itself suggests you might be living hand to mouth and not saving.  Keeping track of your money and budgeting are useful tools which help people get on top of their money.  Which tends to have the effect of allowing you to save.   How much did you spend on groceries last month? Eating out? Gas? If you were ""keeping track of your money"", you could say immediately what you spent, and whether that is above or below average, and why.  How much do you plan to spend in the next 3 months on gas, groceries, eating out?  If you knew the answer to that question, then you would have a ""budget"".   And if those months go by, and your budget proves to have been accurate, or educates you as to what went wrong so you can learn and fix it... then your budget is a functioning document that is helping you master your money.  Certainly the more powerful of the two is the ""keeping track"", or accounting of what has happened to you so far.   It's important that you keep track of every penny without letting stuff ""slip through the cracks"".   Here you can use proper accounting techniques and maybe accounting software, just like businesses do where they reconcile their accounting against their bank statements and wallet cash. I shortcut that a little.  I buy gift cards for McDonalds, Panera, Starbucks, etc. and buy my meals with those.  That way, I only have one transaction to log, $40 - McDonalds gift card instead of a dozen little meals.  It works perfectly fine since I know all that money went to fast food.  A little more dangerous is that I treat wallet cash the same way, logging say two monthly entries of $100 to cash rather than 50 little transactions of left $1 tip at restaurant.  This only works because cash is a tiny part of my overall expenditures - not worth accounting.  If it added up to a significant part, I'd want accounting on that." While you're asking about a particular bank, I'll give my opinion of this in general.  I think a $12,000 household income is pretty low to be given credit. The risk to the bank is certainly higher than if the income were at that $35,000 level. They can use this to differentiate what they offer for perks, and if they ever collateralize the debt of these cards, it's a clearly defined demographic. "It sounds like what you are looking for are sites that offer pre-paid debit cards as rewards. A number of survey/get-paid-to sites do offer these as a potential reward; they are more irritating than having the money in a bank account or paypal balance, as they expire if not used within some amount of time, and generally come with restrictions on what you can use them on (they work like credit cards, but the site providing the card can reject your request if it doesn't like the site you're trying to pay.). Plus, you can only use a single debit card per purchase, so if you have two $20 prepaid cards, you can't use them both to make a $40 dollar purchase. Still, this does satisfy your requirements, assuming the game you want to transfer to and the provider of the prepaid card you're being rewarded with are willing to work together. You can use SurveyPolice to search for sites that offer the type of reward you want - filtering by offered reward type is an option under their ""pick-a-perk"" page.  Though it's likely many of those sites also require you to be at least 18 as well, as that's a pretty common restriction - you'll have to verify that part yourself. For that matter, you would want to check age restrictions on the sites those sites partner with to offer prepaid cards, as well." Yes, retail stores will let you use multiple cards to make a purchase. Just be sure to know the exact balance on each one and tell the cashier how much you'd like to put on each card. If you don't know the balance and try to charge more than what is available, your card will be declined. We have machines in several grocery store chains that will take your coins, sort them, and give you two ways to get your money back: I've seen these many places, but, of course, I cannot say for sure if there are any near you.