BigHabitat
Level 2 Member
I see on Mr. Pickles blog that he has uncovered an(other) exploit using Costco’s generous return policy to generate many thousands of miles. The gist of if is to:
- buy an expensive diamond ring (~$27k in the picture in the post)
- pay for it quickly with a points earning debit card
- ask for a size 9 (which they wont have because they only carry size 7 and you can get it sized elsewhere),
- and then ask for a refund since the size 7 won’t work for you. Since Costco can’t return funds to a debit card, they will cut you a check.
Here is a way I earned around 10,000 plus miles for free last week. Of course he has got a knack for finding “deals” (e.g., US Mint) and smart enough to have done his intentionally with little work, and my find was unintentional, a crapload of work, and probably doesn’t even work consistently.
As background, I needed a patio set for some extra seating. After looking around, we found one that looked decent at Sears. Well, it didn’t look as nice as the onces from Costco or Sam’s Club, but it looked good enough and at a little over $1100, it was a lot cheaper. Of course the net price wasn’t really $1,100, since it returned about $220 back in points, and there was a 8x portal bonus so I could use the double dip of buying gift cards through the portal and then buying the patio set to generate around 20,000 points in total.
So the patio set came, in two large boxes. I unpacked them to get started on the assembly which started with chairs that had kind of a hinge. It was hard to line up, and literally the second bolt went about halfway in and then was pretty much stuck (broke one of the throwaway wrenches included). This wasn’t a good omen, since there was a lot more assembly required and it was pretty clear that even if finished the build quality on this set was not what we were looking for, despite having a different set from the same brand that had worked out well for us before.
So I decided to bite the bullet and return this set and get one from Costco or Sams Club that we were sure we would be happy with. My premise was that I was going to be hosed with $1100 of Sears gift cards that would take ages to unwind given the lack of deals, but so be it.
So heres the sequence of events:
- Repacked existing Sears set as best we could
- Loaded one big box in our bigger SUV
- Took smaller SUV to Sam’s Club to look at sets
- Signed up for Sam’s Club Plus membership with the $45 Groupon which gives a $20 gift card plus whole chicken, salsa, and cupcakes
- Saw the Maker’s Mark Heritage 6 piece set for $1699 and loved it. Bought it.
- Drove home
- I took larger SUV with box to Sears, explained we wanted to return it. No problem.
- Drove home to get second box
- Dropped off at Sears
- Drove home to pick up second box
- Drove back to Sears with second box
- Went to customer service to process refund. System had a problem issuing new gift card for full balance of over $1,100 (I thought there was a $500 limit on gift cards, so perhaps that’s the reason?).
Service rep asked if I minded receiving the refund in cash. Umm, “Yes, Please! I mean, sure, no problem.” - Drive to Home Depot to rent truck ($19.99 for 75 minutes)
- Had a quick lunch while waiting for a truck (all 3 were out)
- Picked up truck and drove to the Sam’s Club to pick up the set.
- Drove home to drop off the set
- Drove the truck back to Home Depot
- Assembled the set. Mercifully, this was probably the quickest step, as couch and chairs were assembled so only the table needed to be set up. Phew!
Now obviously this isn’t the largest points score in the world and I don’t think this would work consistently. My guess is that it was because the customer service rep tried to create one new gift card with the entire balance (and cards are limited to $500), instead of refunding it back to the 4-5 original cards.
I certainly don’t suggest people try buying patio sets online and returning them in store. It’s not something I did intentionally and you can see from the steps that it was a pain. Of course if you were doing it just for the points with the intention of returning you could have stopped midway through my chore list.. Still. I’m not doing any further experiments on this one.
And while Costco gets all the glory for their generous return policy, kudos to Sears for a no-hassle return in this case.
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