Good news! Gift card purchases at Speedway are still earning Speedy Rewards points.
When publishing a post about the latest Speedway monthly perks options, I noticed that they’d added an exclusion for “all prepaid cards”. I’d assumed that referred to reloadable cards like Green Dot and so didn’t think much of it initially, but a reader checked with Speedway and was advised that from July 1 gift card purchases would no longer earn double merchandise points if selecting that as your monthly perk.
That would’ve been disappointing, but the additional concern was that gift card purchases would be excluded from earning the standard 20x points for merchandise too. I decided to test that out this morning and am pleased to report success – sort of.
I bought a $500 Best Buy gift card and a $2.49 pack of Krispy Kreme donut holes, because why not. As you can see in the image above, I earned 16,099 points for the purchase. At 40x points (20x as the standard merchandise rate plus 20x for July’s monthly perk on merchandise purchases), the $2.49 for the donut holes earned 99 points.
That means my $500 Best Buy gift card purchase earned 16,000 points. That’s great news because it means gift card purchases are still earning points, but I’m a little confused by the earnings. 16,000 points means I earned 32 points per dollar. That’s more than the standard 20x which suggests gift card purchases are still earning bonus points from the monthly perk, but less than the 40x I’d have expected.
I’m fairly new to Speedy Rewards, so I might be missing some kind of reason as to why these earnings weren’t as expected. If you have any clue as to why I earned 32x rather than 40x, please let me know in the comments below.
Update: Dan commented below giving a potential explanation and it makes perfect sense. It looks like gift card purchases no longer earn the monthly perk on merchandise purchases, but they do still earn the regular 20x rate. That accounts for 10,000 points, with the other 6,000 points seemingly related to this new deal offering 300 points when buying a $25 gift card. It looks like that offer is not only valid on all third party gift cards, but you earn 300 bonus points for every $25 you spend on gift cards.
In my scenario, the $500 gift card purchase triggered that 300 bonus points offer 20 times (20 * $25 = $500) which comes to 6,000 points.
[…] Update 7/1/20: False alarm – gift card purchases are still earning points – see this post for more. […]
The only thing I can figure (and I’ve been wrong before) is that you earned the normal 20 points per $1 for the gift card as well as 6,000 points for the current promo of 300 points for buying a $25 gift card. Looks like you got 300 points for each $25 increment (20 x 300 = 6,000)?
“Get 300 Bonus Points for every $25 spent on eligible gift cards when you use your Speedy Rewards account. – https://www.speedway.com/gift-cards
Yes, that makes perfect sense. I think you’re right – looks like I need to update a few posts!