Archives for March 2017

Starbucks After 2pm Week-Long Dash returns (March 14-20; YMMV)

Don’t forget to take advantage of the previously mentioned Starbucks BINGO offer. If you are a frequent shopper there, you should be able to get the whole of the 300 Bonus Stars. This is no small amount. 300 bonus stars are two full rewards plus another 50 points (40% of a full reward).

But time won’t stand still! Starbucks is back with the “After 2pm” Dash. You have to manually opt-in to this offer, so check your email (associated with your Starbucks account) or the app to see if you have been invited. You have to first click the “Join the Dash” button in their email before you earn any bonuses. This is YMMV, I don’t know if every customer gets every offer.

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March 13, 2017 Filed Under: foods Tagged With: ,

YMMV Amex Blue Offers Upgrade to Preferred with $150 Bonus on $1000+ spend

If you have an American Express Blue credit card, check your AMEX Offers (at their website or app). You may have been offered an Upgrade promotion to the Blue Cash Preferred credit card. The upgrade promo is a $150 statement credit if you make $1000+ in purchases during the first three months of the upgrade.

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March 13, 2017 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With: ,

How to redeem the 99c movie rental promotion with the Google Play Office Depot promotion

Google Play has developed new “technology” when it comes to running physical gift card promotions. They run a promotion at Office Depot until 3/11/17 that got you the bonus of renting any Google Play movie for just 99c (eg you could use it for the $6 Arrival rental) IF you purchase a plastic physical Google Play gift card at Office Depot.

But the promotion does not print at the cash register. It gets linked behind the scenes to your specific gift card when you make the Office Depot purchase. This worked on all gift card options, I did this with a $10 gift card.

So in order to redeem the offer, you go to your Google Play account and redeem the gift card the same way you do always. When you do…

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March 11, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , , ,

Staples 300/20 VISA offer returns March 12-18 in 2017

The VISA gift card promotion is making a comeback at Staples brick and mortar stores during the shopping week of March 12-18 in 2017. The terms are the same as before. You have to buy $300+ in VISA gift cards. Then you file an Easy Rebate (can be submitted online; nothing to mail in physically) and a few weeks later you will receive a $20 Staples gift card by mail. The rebate using data from your cash register receipt, so it’s easy to do (and works well for them too, since they can verify the purchase directly from the cash register data).

The strategy is the same as before, you have to get to the $300 amount using two or one gift cards. $300 gift cards are unicorns (hard to find), so the most realistic way is using one $200 and $100 VISA gift card. This will get you about $7 of profit, which is not bad for a $213 investment and a one month vesting period.

Plus, if you pay with a Chase INK credit card, you will receive 5% cashback on your credit card. Then you can use the VISA gift cards on items that would otherwise only get 1% credit card rewards.

TIP: sometimes they have gift cards throughout the store, hanging from the shelves – in addition to the gift card section. If you can’t find them in the gift card section, you may want to take a mini walk around the store for a little bit of a treasure hunt. Or ask the employees 🙂

March 11, 2017 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With: , , ,

T-Mobile Tuesdays for March 14 include Chipotle Guac and Chips

REDEMPTION DAY: The offer is now live! To get your free chips and guac, you login to the T-Mobile Tuesdays website or app, and proceed. It takes you to a Chipotle promotional website where you have to enter your information. The promotional code will be sent via text, so make sure you enter the correct number there!

Once you enter your info, you will receive a text message. Mine arrived within seconds. The text message has a link. You open that with a web browser, and it has a computer-readable code with the offer. You can bookmark the page, take a screenshot, or even save it to Android PAY!

You must claim the offer by 5am ET on Wednesday, but once you claim the offer, you have until 3/31/17 to use it (get the free guac and chips).

ORIGINAL POST:
Chipotle is boldly going with a T-Mobile Tuesdays freebie. If it wasn’t for the e-coli troubles of a few months ago, this would have been impossible to get #cynic 🙂 Regardless, on Tuesday March 14 in 2017, the headliner of the T-Mobile Tuesdays freebies is a free guacamole and chips at Chipotle. Assuming this is the standard size you can buy at their stores (and not a smaller T-Mobile sample size), this is a meal-size side ~ at least in terms of calories 🙂 And it’s pretty yummy, salt and avocados 🙂

The other freebies include the useful FandangoNOW movie rental (up to $5 towards a single movie rental or the purchase of a TV show ~ which is nice) and two $5 Lyft ride credits. Lyft has been offering T-Mobile credits long before Uber got in trouble in various different ways 🙂

PS: don’t forget to check on April 4 if you are a baseball fan, they will offer 1-Year Subscription of MLB.tv. They already offer this promotion the previous season, it’s legit!

March 9, 2017 Filed Under: foods Tagged With: ,

Save the Date: April 4 gets you 1-year of MLB Premium At Bat subscription (T-Mobile Tuesdays)

If you are a fan of Major League Softball (okay, Baseball, but it’s sports smack week) and you are a T-Mobile customer, make sure you don’t miss the Tuesday April 4 (2017) freebies, because one of them will be a 1-year FREE subscription to the MLB Premium At Bat streaming package. This is a season-long subscription, just like last year. The usual exclusions apply, regional blackouts and the like.

They have an official teaser at the Tuesdays websites (see screenshot below):

March 8, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

New Starbucks Bonus Stars Bingo a great way to pile up Stars for regular customers

If you are a regular Starbucks customer, you may be able to pile up on Bonus Stars, up to 300 total, if you participate in the new Starbucks Bonus Stars Bingo. You have to manually opt-in to the promotion by clicking on the email or app message for the offer.

Once you do, you have a grid of nine bubbles, each one a “challenge”. You earn 10 bonus stars for each challenge you complete, and bonus stars if you complete three vertical, horizontal or diagonal lines. If you complete the whole board, you will get 300 bonus stars total.

The “challenges” are things like “place three mobile orders” and “visit four different stores” and “buy something before and after 12pm on the same time” and so forth.

The promotion runs until April 3 in 2017, so you have plenty of time to complete the various challenges. Especially if you strategically combine promotions that get you checkmarks on multiple bubbles.

On the website over there, click on each bubble to get a detail on the challenge. Their website is mobile optimized, so you can check from your smartphone. The only annoyance is that you have to login every time 🙁

March 7, 2017 Filed Under: foods Tagged With: ,

March 2017 ebook options are up at Samsung Book Deals

Every month a number of places give out free e-books. The Kindle First program is not the only one. If you have a Samsung device that is eligible to participate in the Samsung Book Deals, and if you have installed the Kindle app from Samsung’s own app store (not Google Play, not Amazon’s app store), then you can head over to the “Book Deals” section of the app, and select one free ebook from a choice of four.

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March 7, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

The March 2017 Tor e-Book Freebie is READY!

If you like to read FREE and DRM-free e-books, you have until March 13 in 2017 to scoop up the March 2017 freebie from Tor. The free book given away this month at their Monthly e-Book Club is “Shadow & Claw” by Gene Wolfe. You have to enter your email for this. After that you can download the book in ePUB (everybody else) and MOBI (Kindle). You can download both versions, you don’t have to select one of each.

These typically start earlier in the month, but for March 2017, they got a late start. But you still have the same amount of time (one week) to claim the freebie 🙂

March 7, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , , ,

T-Mobile Tuesday freebies for March 7 are media-centric

UPDATE: the free pizza promotion (for the remaining customers (lines) who didn’t get it before) was not mentioned in the app teasers, but it appeared to the lines of everyone who should have, it will look like this in your Tuesdays app:

Media is the theme of the Tuesday March 7 (2017) for T-Mobile customers. It is a mix of digital freebies and real-world coupons. The good news is that the FandangoNOW offer has been improved. Now you can also use your $5 credit towards the purchase of TV shows. You can still use it towards a movie rental. Unless they changed something (to make it like the much better Vudu offer), you can only rent one movie, even if it costs less than $5. We’ll have to wait and see on Tuesday! I’ll test it out and post an update as soon as I can.

The other digital freebie is a one month ad-free subscription to the Slacker music streaming service. Slacker is also part of the prizes (the ones without the magenta gift icon on the left side), so you may want to play those silly app and web games if you want to have a chance at winning a bigger Slacker prize.

The other two offers are coupons. You can get 50% off George Strait concert tickets, and the usual 25% off at Papa John’s pizza.

Not shown in the teaser of the time of writing, but it should be there according to previous Tuesday postings is the last round of FREE Papa John’s pizza. This is on a line by line basis, not by T-Mobile account, so be sure to check all your lines!

March 4, 2017 Filed Under: shopping Tagged With: ,

Buy Google Play Gift Card ($10+), Get 99c Digital Movie Rental

At Office Depot and Office Max brick and mortar stores, until the close of business on Saturday 3/11/17, if you buy one of the plastic Google PLAY gift cards, you will receive a promo code that can get you a 99c movie rental on any movie available at Google Play. This is a pretty good deal if you want to rent new releases which go as high as $5.99 (eg Arrival). A $10 Gift Card is the minimum, which is still pretty good!

I haven’t done this offer yet. I will let you know how it goes. I will also check to see whether you can pay for this with Office Depot-Max Rewards or not (which would make it an even better deal).

March 4, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,

Free TPO SIM card with Free Shipping

If you want to try an alternative carrier to the Big (Evil) Four, a new emerging option is TPO, or The People’s Operator. The Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined this company in 2014, so that’s one plus they have over the many other alternative carriers out there.

For a limited time (they do not mention expiration date), you can get a FREE TPO SIM card. This is a 3-in-1 card, so it should fit all GSM phones. Free shipping as well. You pay nothing to get this card, you don’t give them any credit card info. You are also under no obligation to activate or use it.

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March 1, 2017 Filed Under: services Tagged With: , ,

Kindle First Choices for March 2017 are up

And just like that, March 2017 is here, which means, for Prime members, a new e-book pre-release freebie is available to get right now and read right now before its official April 2017 release through the Kindle First program. If you are not a Prime member, you can purchase one of the six for $2.

Without further ado, here are the six choices for March 2017:

  • “Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations” by Garson O’Toole in Nonfiction (398 pages) – this looks to be the most promising of this lot (I got this one)
  • “The Practice House” by Laura McNeal in Literary Fiction
  • “The Last Paradise” by Antonio Garrido, Simon Bruni in Historical Fiction
  • “A Criminal Defense” by William L. Myers Jr. in Legal Thrillers
  • “The Halo Effect: A Novel” by Anne D. LeClaire in Suspense
  • “The Breaking Light (Split City Book 1)” by Heather Hansen in Scifi

As usual, if none of these “speaks to you” (so to speak), you don’t have to get one immediately. You have until March 31st (2017) to make a choice. In a few more days, each book will have a lot more reviews as the “early adopters” and voracious readers go through them. Then you can use the customer reviews to figure out what to get, or what to avoid (reviews seem to be better at this than the former).

March 1, 2017 Filed Under: media Tagged With: , ,