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Best Buy Reward Zone credit card now offering 5.5% back on everything

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What a pleasant surprise to see this show up in our inbox:

best buy credit card 5 percent

This is interesting for a lot of reasons:

  • It’s a full percentage point upgrade over the old rewards, which were 4%. If you read the fine print, here’s how the 5% is calculated: 

Get 2.5 points (1 base point plus 1.5 bonus points) per $1 spent (5% back in rewards) on qualifying purchases when you choose Standard Credit with your Reward Zone Credit Card at Best Buy stores or BestBuy.com.

  • If you’re a Premier Silver member, you actually get 5.5%, since Silver members get an extra 25% on base points.
  • If you’re a credit card aficionado, the questions you need to be asking yourself are, what can I buy besides electronics at Best Buy? Do those things also qualify for rewards? And can Reward Zone gift certificates be used on everything at Best Buy?
  • As has been the case with the Best Buy credit card, the marketing is poorly executed. The  picture could be more clear about the 5% (is this permanent, or a limited time offer?), and there is nothing about it on the website, which is still advertising 4% rewards.
  • We now move from facts to idle speculation… This comes almost two months after news broke that Capital One was selling the Best Buy portfolio. Breaking the 5% barrier is a big deal–why launch this initiative now? Citibank has yet to take over from Capital One, and the marketing campaign has the look of neglect, which is what we would expect from a lame duck portfolio owner. The sale was announced and the purchase price has been agreed on, so Cap One can’t be pushing this.
  • If Capital One isn’t the impetus behind this campaign, then who else could be pushing this but Best Buy? But then we have to ask why Best Buy would be executing this campaign at this particular time, when its portfolio is in a bit of an awkward spot. The only thing we could think of is that Best Buy is possibly getting a little desperate and pushing hard for revenue. We can’t help but think of how GM handled GMAC before the bottom fell out of the credit market.
  • So… we’re not saying you should short BBY, but we sure as heck wouldn’t have a long position. Enjoy the 5.5%, though.

HHonors devaluation, Best Buy news, and a $19 unlimited cell phone plan

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HHONORS UUPDATE: Good grief! The Hilton HHonors program is experiencing a currency devaluation the likes of which have not been seen since Weimar Germany, or possibly Zimbabwe. Gary at View From The Wing is all over this one, and here’s his chart of the old award levels next to the new ones:

Ouch

So instead of seven categories topping out at 50,000 points, we now have 10 categories topping out at 95,000 points. One of the great things about the Hilton HHonors program was the value it offered for high-end redemptions, and it seems that has fallen by the wayside, though we’re guessing the lower and middle levels will be squeezed as well.

Mommy Points correctly points out that Hyatt and Starwood offer much better value on a per-point basis, while The Points Guy contrasts the Hilton changes to other recent hotel chain point devaluations and calculates how much spending is needed for a free night at a top-tier room. We would add that the Citi Reserve card, which offers two free nights upon sign-up and one free night per year, becomes that much more valuable since its value remains unaffected by the devaluation.

SOME RELEVANT BEST BUY NEWS: A couple of Best Buy items today. First, Deals We Like points out that you can get 6% back on online Best Buy purchases via TopCashBack.  We haven’t tried this out, but does TopCashBack let you double dip by ordering Best Buy gift cards online and then using the gift cards to pay for another order? Just throwing that out there. 6% is pretty good.

The other item is that Capital One is selling its Best Buy portfolio. This is interesting because Capital One just bought HSBC’s credit card portfolio, including the Best Buy card, less than a year ago. The good news here is the buyer of the portfolio: Citibank! We’re big fans of Citibank’s promotions, so we’re hoping the BBY card becomes a little more interesting from a customer perspective.

$19 UNLIMITED CELL PHONE PLAN: The Wall Street Journal reports on a $19 unlimited voice, data, and text cell phone plan offered by Republic Wireless. You might think that there would be a catch with a $19 unlimited plan, and you would be right. Here’s Walt Mossberg:

So what’s the catch? Well, Republic is using an unusual technology approach that’s smart and may even represent the future. But today, it doesn’t deliver the best voice quality and it requires a specially equipped phone. The sole phone that works with the system now is mediocre.

Republic is mostly able to offer such low monthly prices because it’s a Wi-Fi-centric carrier. That means whenever you make a voice call while the phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network, your Republic phone places it over Wi-Fi rather than using a costlier cellular phone network. The same is true of texts.

You aren’t limited to Wi-Fi calling and texting—the phone can make calls, send texts and connect to the Internet over Sprint’s cellular network, at no extra charge. But Republic believes so many people connect their phones to Wi-Fi so often that most calls and other activity will be conducted over Wi-Fi, saving the company money on payments it makes to Sprint. And it says it has developed a system that properly places 911 calls over Wi-Fi, which has often been a problem.

Unfortunately, the only phone that works with this plan costs $249 and is not very good. If it weren’t for that fact, we’d be very interested, but we’ll pass for now. If you’re in the market for a cheap cell phone plan, you might want to think about the $30 monthly plan from T-mobile combined with Google Voice, which will give you unlimited data and minutes but with a better phone selection.

OMG!!! Best Buy gets PWNED!!!!!

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PARDON OUR HEADLINE–WE FROWN UPON THAT SORT OF IMMATURITY: How big was yesterday’s coupon mess at Best Buy? Even the mainstream media noticed, assuming Business Insider counts as mainstream. From their article:

“It was a free for all!” wrote Casey Chan at Gizmodo. “People were getting gift cards for half the price, people were using the coupons over and over and over again and Best Buy was even letting the coupon work on products that rarely get discounted.”

The folks over at Slickdeals posted a bunch of the awesome stuff they scored.

Take a look at $1,600 worth of gift cards for $800, an Apple TV for $45.15, and $2,500 of Amazon cards.

It’s amazing that something like this ever saw the light of day. There are thousands of people all over the country whose hobby (and in some cases, side business) is figuring out how to maximize deals at major retailers. For better or worse, that’s the reality we live in. Most retailers have caught on and have safeguards and processes in place to deal with it. Best Buy? Apparently they had yet to encounter deal-seeking customers before yesterday.

The most basic questions one can ask about a coupon like this:

  1. Will this give me a large discount–so large, that I can buy stuff with this coupon and sell on Ebay?
  2. Is this repeatable, or a one-time only thing?
  3. Can I buy giftcards?

Best Buy went 0 for 3. Given the immense destructive potential, you’d think they’d have some sort of process in place to check the coupons before sending them out to the public, but they apparently don’t. If companies were smart, they’d hire people to look for opportunities to game the system with new promotions and products before their release…if companies were smart.

IN A RELATED STORY: $200 of free coffee for small business owners!

ALSO: 25% back in Staples rewards, and a whole bunch of free paper! You can actually get Staples to pay you to take paper from them if you work the deal right.

50 GB OF FREE CLOUD STORAGE WITH MEGA: Remember Kim Dotcom? He’s back.

AMEX FOLLOW-UP: We mentioned the Amex Gold 75,000 point deal yesterday, and we’re mentioning it again because it’s a great deal. Mommy Points and View From The Wing both have rundowns of the deal and suggest ways to maximize, list transfer partners. and so forth. Again, the offer expires in six days.

DEAL ALERT: Best Buy is feeling generous!

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A WHIFF OF DESPERATION FROM BEST BUY HQ: Best Buy is now offering a $10 gift card when you buy a $50 gift card. This is only available online, it’s one $10/$50 per transaction, and the offer expires December 18.  It is a very good deal, as evidenced by the degree to which it has blown up on Slickdeals, and if it is not obvious to you why this is a good deal, please let us explain why:

  • Repeatability. “Rinse and repeat” is in effect here, as there does not seem to be a limit on the number of times you can do the deal.
  • Fungibility. Some stores let you use gift cards to buy other gift cards, and Best Buy is one such store. Two gift cards to look for at best buy are Kindle gift cards, which can be used at Amazon, and Visa gift cards. Last time I checked–which was, admittedly, a year ago–Best Buy carried Visa gift cards and you could buy them with a BB gift card. The Visa GCs had a $200 max and a $6 activation fee. If that option is still available, you could do the deal three times, pay $150 out of pocket, and get $174 on your Visa GC. In other words, it’s cash (equivalent) for 14% off.
  • Amex. If you sync your Amazon card on Twitter you can get $20 off a $200 purchase. So if you do the deal four times, then combine your gift cards into one transaction before Dec 31, you can get $260 worth of merchandise from Best Buy for $200. You can do this once per Amex card that you have.

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