This could be inconvenient for those of you in Stop & Shop land. Stop & Shop has announced a policy change relating to the sale of gift cards which could prove to be a hindrance for anyone looking to buy gift cards in volume at their stores.
As per the image above:
Effective immediately, the Stop & Shop Supermarket Company has a daily gift card purchase limit of $2,000 per day, per person.
- This gift card limit is based on a person’s total monetary spend on purchasing gift cards in one day, at any of our stores throughout the chain.
- This gift card limit includes the limit of one individual payment tender (credit card, debit card, etc.) to the $2,000 limit.
The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company reserves the right to limit or deny the sale of gift cards.
I’m not entirely sure how they’ll enforce the latter bullet point. While I can see how they could place a restriction on the number of payment methods you use per transaction, you could still pay for a $500 gift card with a credit card, a $500 gift card with a debit card, a $500 gift card with cash, etc. provided you pay for them in separate transactions.
Anyway, that’s the less notable part of this announcement. The biggest impact is the overall limit of $2,000 per day. It’ll presumably still be possible to buy $2,000 per day at different stores, but not linked to the same GO Rewards account.
There’s no news yet on whether Giant and Martin’s will follow suit. It seems like they’ve been aligning their rewards programs recently, so it wouldn’t surprise me if those chains announce something similar in the coming weeks or months, but there’s no indication yet that they’ll be doing that.
h/t jz48 via Eugene
Its an unusual approach to change the official corporate policy using an undated, homemade sign. It will be interesting to see if and when the official signs will now be removed.
Also, I can see this being a problem purchasing 4 VGC, as factoring in the fee will lift the total over $2000. This memo certainly does not clarify their intent if the fee is or is not included.
Personally, I rarely purchase more than 3 x $500 at a time, for a variety of reasons, but I don’t like the change at all, and it really doesn’t direct impact me.
That’s a good point – I’d just been thinking about it from the perspective of buying third party gift cards.
I doubt they’ll be as (somewhat) sophisticated as Giftcards.com where they include the activation fee in the limit, so I’d imagine 4x $500 VGCs will be fine. We’ll hopefully start getting some data points in the coming days and weeks, although it might even be that this limit isn’t hard coded, in which case it’ll be YMMV depending on the store and cashier you get that day.
as someone who works at stop and shop, we just sent the name of the person purchasing the gift cards and that they aren’t allowed to purchase anymore gift cards