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Banana Republic / Old Navy / Gap credit card has a nice promotion

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After reading about the Banana Republic credit card’s generous marketing promotions over at MilesAbound, I was inspired to get my own to see what would happen. I can’t complain–I’ve received maybe $50 worth of clothing with minimal effort–but it hasn’t been amazing either.

I was therefore delighted to see the following promotion show up in my mailbox yesterday:banana republic nov 14 promotion 2

Wow! 200 bonus points for every credit card purchase. 1,000 points gets you a $10 gift card, so that’s $2 for every purchase.

I was considerably less delighted to see the following condition for this promotion:

banana republic nov 14 promotion 3

Well, nuts. But still: 25 purchases get me $50 of free clothing. Plus Old Navy / Gap / Banana Republic are always doing promotions with coupons, cardholder discounts, and the like so you can increase your yield.

Here’s a question: how much annual benefit does a card need to make it worth getting? If this card gave away $5 worth of clothing every year, nobody would care. If it gave away $500, there would probably be a lot more interest. Is $50 worth it? $100? What’s your cut-off point for getting a card with no sign-up bonus?

Who owns the credit card blogs?

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“A company that helps you find the perfect credit card is now worth $1 billion,” said a recent headline in Business Insider:

Credit Karma, a credit-tracking personal finance site, raised $75 million on Monday in a new round of funding that values the company at more than $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The new funding, coming just six months after its $85 million Series C, was led by Google Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Susquehanna Growth Equity. The 7-year-old company now has raised over $193 million.

Credit Karma is one of the big players in credit card affiliate marketing. Another big one is a company called Bankrate.com. BankRate owns CreditCards.com, a credit card marketing site disguised as a credit card advice site. [Read more…]

8% back with the Toys R Us credit card!

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8% IS THE NEW 5%?: I received this notification from Toys R Us in my inbox a few days ago:

toys r us cc

This is apparently the new standard, not just a one-off promotion. $10 per $125 spent works out to 8%, which is pretty good, and this applies to Babies R Us as well. How good is it?

I went by the nearest Toys R Us to check out their gift card suppy. This is the extent of it:

toyrs r us gc rackSo unless you do all your spending at Applebee’s, Burger King, and Barnes & Noble, there is no “8% Everywhere” scheme in play here as far as I know. That said, I have only checked this one Toys R Us and I haven’t checked any Babies R Us stores yet, so who knows.

 

How many of your points and miles go unredeemed?

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I got to wondering how good people are at redeeming their points and miles, and a bit of googling returned this article about a study which claimed that one third of all your hard-earned loyalty earnings go unused.

Being the empirical sort, I set out to verify this for myself if possible. This involved going to the Discover 2013 annual report, which you can get here if you’re curious. The report doesn’t explicitly say how many points are earned or redeemed, but it does give a few hints. For starters, in summarizing its accounting for earned rewards, Discover says that a 100 basis point change in redemption would result in additional expenses of $13 million. 100 basis points is a fancy way of saying 1 percent, so this would imply total rewards earned, both redeemed and unredeemed, are valued at $1.3 billion. [Read more…]

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