Missing Deals, Making Deals – Serve, Rite Aid, and Diamonds

So the news hit today that Rite Aid and Dollar General will be allowing fee free cash loads onto Serve. The only reason why this matters is because there are already reports that prepaid gift card loads have been successful (a friend of mine loaded a bunch today).

I’m in danger of missing this deal because I was not prepared for it. When Redbird died, the best practice was to switch over to a Serve or Bluebird as soon as possible. If you were on top of things, you wouldn’t even have missed a month of loads. I didn’t go out of my way to do anything of the sort because Walmart is far and I can’t stand it. It wasn’t a priority for me.

Rite Aid, on the other hand, is across the street from me. But unlike others who started liquidating immediately today, I wasn’t able to. In fact, the fastest I’d be able to get up and running is a week or two. If, like me, you were lazy, feel free to follow Doctor of Credit’s checklist.

There is, of course, the chance that I completely missed this “deal.” Rite Aid registers could be hard coded in two weeks for all I know. It’s happened before. That’s why it’s important to be prepared to jump on things as soon as they happen. That usually means not staying stuck in a dead system if you have an alternative.

One deal I did manage to jump on was the Hyatt and Hilton Diamond status match. That was a pretty nice stocking stuffer and it only happened because I happened to be awake at 1 AM. Still don’t get what the heck Hyatt was thinking but I don’t understand marketing in general…

My feelings about both these “deals” are the same – I am neither overly excited nor overly disappointed. There really is no point. In this day and age, the 24 hour news/blog cycle makes every deal feel like the best deal in the world, every devaluation feel like the worst, and can often cause me to panic/make bad decisions. Well, no more. Stick to the plan, jump on deals if you are lucky enough, don’t sweat the ones that you miss. There are always more fish in the sea.