The Few, The Proud...

[JakeFromStateFarm]

Last week, I signed up in-branch for a Citi Prestige, and during the long wait to get a CSR to move credit lines around, I was chatting with the Citi Personal Banker who was helping me.

She said that the overwhelming number of credit applications she has done in-branch with Citi have been basic, no annual fee cards. In fact, she said that she had personally opened less than 5 annual fee cards in her 16+ years with Citi. Mind you, this is not some rural, backwoods location. This is a busy NYC suburb.

Maybe that's an anomaly, but it definitely reminded me that our community is still quite small, and relatively unknown to the mainstream US consumer. The question is how small, exactly? Reading through blogs and forum posts, it's easy to get the impression that there are huge numbers of travel hackers killing all of the deals, but in the 3+ years since I discovered this fantastic past-time, I have run into only one other obvious travel hacker actually in the same store at the same time as me, buying gift cards.

I'd love to hear other forum members thoughts on the subject. In reality, how big (or small) is this community? It's obvious that a great number of US consumers are credit challenged, so how many are really maximizing credit card rewards? What have your experiences been in different parts of the country or world?

 

[knick1959]

My Walmart has "one other guy" that loads cards in bulk. One clerk calls me "the Credit Card Guy" Although the name doesn't seem to fit the debit cards doing the dance, she knows that CCs are in there, somewhere.

I once saw a fellow buying way overpriced $200 GCs are a supermarket and, even already in the hobby, wondered how he leveraged the $6.95 fee each. Now I know, but that's the only other times I've seen a card hog like me at work. Oh ... I had one experience at Office Max with someone buying multiple GCs.

I would expect to encounter collisions like this more often. I'm working in suburbs around Cleveland (South and West).

 

[GettingReady]

The max at my go-to WM per visit is only $2k, but the manager said I'm the only one that does split transactions.

 

[hooha23]

The hobby is pretty rare where I am, but the city is probably just big enough that people don't seem to care. I have never had a banker nor a MO cashier acknowledge what I was doing. I can leave with ~3K in MOs at two walmarts (each) less than 3 miles from each other easy. I am also always dressed nice for work, so depositing 5-10K in money orders never seems to set off any alarms.

Protip: dressing nice (slacks, shirt, etc) helps when doing anything that could be perceived as "shady".

I only know of one other person in my city that does it. And I happen to work with the guy.

 

[heavenlyjane]

When I used to load my Serve card at RiteAid, the cashier said people mostly came to his store to add money to their cards. Each time I'd come in, he'd beg me to explain the gig. He was such a sweet guy, I finally explained how it worked (telling him that I use it to get points for paying my mortgage). It appeared like lots of people to MSing in my big city.

 

[AlaskanTraveler]

In my 4 years of MS, I have only run into one other MSer at OfficMx when they had one of those buy $300 get $20 off. He was obviously a newby as I had bought out all of the fixed $200 gcs and he was arguing with the manager about why he couldn't buy variable $500 gc with a cc. I live in a city of 300k people. Had a WM cashier tell me that someone else had requested the same amounts of MOs. 999.70 x 2, but never seen anyone actually in line doing it. In all of my world travels, I've only encountered one churner in person; was at the Andaz in Costa Rica.

 

[ROB BLACK]

The hobby is pretty rare where I am, but the city is probably just big enough that people don't seem to care. I have never had a banker nor a MO cashier acknowledge what I was doing. I can leave with ~3K in MOs at two walmarts (each) less than 3 miles from each other easy. I am also always dressed nice for work, so depositing 5-10K in money orders never seems to set off any alarms.

Protip: dressing nice (slacks, shirt, etc) helps when doing anything that could be perceived as "shady".

I only know of one other person in my city that does it. And I happen to work with the guy.

 

[ROB BLACK]

I am on the Northshore....have not tried MO since Bluebird dies. Would appreciate some tips for Walmart

 

[ilia]

Honestly it is pretty well known (in relation to other parts of the country I have lived) here in the Bay Area.

 

[Coldmode]

Most people in my area seem to be completely unaware. I've never run into a cashier who looked like they knew what I was doing when I asked for a 999.30 MO, and I've never seen another person around buying GCs or loading prepaid cards.