It was recently announced that MasterCard would become the exclusive payments partner of the Fuel Rewards Network. We’re hoping this portends a more interesting rewards program (that is, a program with more opportunities for profit for the PFDigest readership), but we thought that in the meantime it might be helpful to take a look at what the program offers so that those of you able to benefit from it may do so.
The Fuel Rewards Network offers discounts on gas from Shell gas stations. If you play your cards right, these discounts can potentially be lucrative. There are two main ways to earn gas discounts: dining and groceries.
The dining discounts are offered via the Rewards Network. Even if you’ve never heard of the Rewards Network, you may be familiar with its product: if you’ve ever participated in various airlines’ dining rewards programs (e.g. AAdvantage Dining) or UPromise, you’ve signed up with them. Note that you can only be enrolled in one Rewards Network program at a time, so if you opt to earn FRN rewards via dining, you will not be eligible to earn miles for AA or cash with UPromise.
The other, and potentially much better use of the program, is with grocery stores. Rewards vary from store to store, so you’ll have to investigate stores near you. Here’s a list of all participants. In some cases the rewards are not usually worth the trouble, as is the case with Bi-Lo, where you only get discounts for buying a certain amount of certain products.
But at Winn-Dixie, on the other hand, you get 5 cents off per gallon for every fifty dollars of groceries. So if your SUV takes 20 gallons of gas, you’re getting an additional 2% off your groceries–in addition to the 5% you’re hopefully already getting by using the right credit card. It may be possible to earn even more by buying gift cards at the grocery. Here’s an example of how to work deals like this from a poster at Fatwallet (note that Giant Eagle is not part of the FRN program, but their program seems to be similar):
The Giant Eagle grocery chain stretches from Pittsburgh PA to Toledo OH. They have the best fuel perk program. For every $50 you spend at the store including gift cards, you get $0.10 off per gallon for 30 gallons. It can vary from store to store, but I found a store 2 hours away that gave $0.20/ gal for every $50 spend. Also my local store will run the occasional promo at this rate for things like fathers day or mothers day to solicit GC purchases. I would go to the $0.20 store once a month and shamelessly drop $10K on gift cards unless my local store was on promo. I travel for work and used to be a Hilton guy, but Marriott sells gift cards at Giant Eagle, so guess who became a Marriott guy. I’d pick up about $2K per month of those. The downside is, they don’t apply fuel perks to cash equivalent purchases. (AMEX GC etc.) There is a clever way to drop the other $8K in GC pretty easily, but I’m keeping this to myself. I’m sure there are plenty of people who are HH’s who could think of ways to make this work even without AMEX or Visa GC’s. Some months I went crazy and did $30K in GC’s. I had a $20K CL on my BCP and a W2 income of ~$150K. I got an FR from AMEX, and passed. As an FYI, I got my FR triggered by going over 1x my credit limit in a month.
Just note that I am in field based sales and travel across Eastern MI and Northern Ohio. This gives me access to a tremendous amount of stores at little to no additional cost and little additional time. I used to time my 1 month GC purchase with a trip in that general direction. Of course on top of this, I was using BCP to pick up the gift cards. I advertised the gas for sale on Craigslist and found a guy who had a 100 gallon tank in his truck bed. He turned around and resold the gas, but I didn’t care. The end result is that when I could buy GC’s at $0.20 fuel perks with a BCP I was making about 14% on my purchases. When I used the gas myself and bought at pump price and was able to get the full gain out of the fuel, I was making 18% on my money.
For me, I was making on average about $1500 cash per month and never thought twice about fuel for my family vehicles. I was able to help out my sister in tough times and sold to her at $1/gallon. With BCP dried up, I’ve moved down to a 5% card at groceries which will clearly put a ding in my margins, but it’s no big deal.
There is one more pretty sweet trick about this. Giant Eagle started a food perks program. For every 10 gallons of gas you pump, you can redeem it for 1% off of groceries up to 20% max on a $300 purchase. Unfortunately this did not include GC’s, but still 20% off groceries with a BCP on top of it made for pretty well priced groceries.
Bottom line: for most of you the Fuel Rewards Network probably won’t be worth bothering with, but it may behoove you to investigate any local grocery affiliates. And if MasterCard decides to make this a more worthwhile program, you’ll certainly read about it here.
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