Have you seen a more beautiful thing this year?!
Back in the day, Staples used to sell variable load Visa gift cards. However, many years ago they stopped doing that and limited denominations to a maximum of $200. Those came with higher fees of $6.95 per card which have since increased to $7.95.
Those high purchase fees and relatively low denomination limits limited the appeal of those cards, although Staples offers fee-free $200 Visa gift cards each month for a week at a time, along with the same thing for their $200 Mastercard gift card counterparts, which made those more enticing.
At some point in recent weeks there’s been a positive development – Staples is now once again selling variable load Visa gift cards. These come with $5.95 purchase fees which means that if you pay with a Chase Ink Cash or Ink Plus card, you’ll earn 2,530 Ultimate Rewards for each card you buy. The effective 1.19% purchase fee might put some people off, instead preferring to stick to the $200 fee-free Visa and Mastercard deals. However, it’s awesome that there’s now a worthwhile opportunity for some 5x spend at Staples every day of the year, especially seeing as liquidation costs could be lower with $500 cards than $200 ones depending on how you liquidate them.
It’ll be interesting to see if Office Depot/OfficeMax start selling variable load Visa gift cards again too.
h/t Ashley
My Office Depot has been selling variable load Visa gift cards for a while. Unfortunately $100 is the highest fixed denomination Visa gift card that they sell.
why would you want fixed GCs when you could get a 500 variable?