For the last 9 months, I have been using my Nationwide Visa Buxx and using the cash back feature. I visit the local Wholefoods Market on the way to work and pick up some fruit for the day. The total bill is usually less than $5 and I would choose the maximum amount back, $100.
The time that I usually patronize Wholefoods is when they open and their till with barely any money. I have encountered a few stares from cashiers or attitudes of “I just opened and I have no money in the register.”
It occurred to me awhile ago that there is one cashier that I see all the time who isn’t quite fond of me. Because of her attitude, it occurred to me that I need to use different cashiers every visit. Why? I have become a little more paranoid and am justifying my actions to reduce the risk of counterfeit bills.
Interesting. US Buxx doesn’t allow cash back (at least, IME). I assumed NW Buxx didn’t either. This changes things. 🙂
Ed, what will you do differently? My strategy with the Visa Buxx – I do cash back with the NW cards and MO’s with the USB.
I exclusively use Chase cards to load. Makes cheap UR points.
Since leaving that comment of mine, I’ve tried POS cash back with NW Buxx with what I’d call “marginal” success. I need to set the stage for this to make sense:
As advertised, NW Buxx cards can have an ATM cash-back limit of up to $200/wk. They also have a purchase limit of $800/wk. My experience shows that it’s not quite as simple as that.
My initial experiments with the NW Buxx card showed that the $800 weekly purchase limit was enforced as expected. However, it also appeared that $800 was the most you could get from the card BY ANY MEANS for that week. In other words, if you were to make a $700 purchase and then tried a $150 ATM withdrawal, the ATM withdrawal would fail … but it would succeed if the ATM withdrawal were only $98 (accounting for the $2 fee). (i.e. The combined limit of money taken off the card in a week could not exceed $800.)
After reading this blog post, I tried to get register cash back, but got very strange results. For example, I was able to make two POS purchases, each with $100 cash back, but all additional attempts at POS cash back fail. This would seem to indicate that POS cash back is treated like an ATM withdrawal and limited to $200 per week. No big deal on that one. I can easily plan accordingly. However …
On another card, a $700+ purchase followed by a single small POS transaction w/ $100 cash back were fine, but an additional attempted small purchase w/ $100 cash back failed, and has continued to fail, even 11 days after the initial purchase. That one has me stumped. Even my proposed “$800 by any means” supposition doesn’t work on that one since the initial purchase and the POS purchase w/ cash would have exceeded $800 and would have failed if that were it.
Stranger still, another card (don’t ask) had a very similar experience, except that the initial large purchase was only $500+. Again the first POS w/ cash back succeeded, but the second one has failed. In that case, all three transactions together would have been under $800 and the two POS cash-back amounts would have been only $200. Stumped.
Looking at the online registers for the cards, they show only the successful transactions. There is no record of the failures. (I guess not triggering a decline fee is a good thing.) I don’t mind getting denied a POS cash-back transaction at an automated check-out, but getting declined buying money orders starts to raise eyebrows after a while. I really need some way of anticipating the “real” rules for these things.
I’d be happy to share specific purchase data with you, privately, but am unwilling to post it here.
Well, scratch that theory … I made my third $100 POS cashback transaction in a seven day period with one card. I think NW just uses a monkey with a magic 8-ball to determine whether the transaction will go through or not. “Signs point to … yes.”
Thanks Ed for the detailed post! I never done anything extensive as that before.
I always do $200 every week at the POS cash back.