Yesterday was a sad day for the Manufactured Spending (MS) community. We learned that the Target Red Card / Redbird was no longer accepting credit card loads. First thing in the morning, I shared my experiences on how I was able to load my Redbird, and then later in the day, I shared a compilation of what we as a community had learned about loading Redbird with different types of cards.
Since everyone is so sad, I thought I’d share a little Redbird-themed humor to hopefully brighten your day.
From Flyertalk:
Flyertalk was probably the funniest – people posting about how Target and/or American Express had ruined their lives by making it so they couldn’t churn through tens of thousands of dollars of MS in a month. The most over the top example:
I went into my local Target today after work hoping to get in the final $2k that I was short on. My plan was to do this “business as usual” and pretend I had no idea about “the memo” or anything else over RB shutting down CC loads.
First checkout register, handed my RB to cashier. Wanted to load $1k on it. She immediately stated CC’s are no longer accepted. I was like “what? No way. Just swipe it.” She said no and sent me over to the CSR checkout lane. I demanded to speak to the Manager. I demanded that he go ahead and load the card. He said “I’m sorry it’s hard coded, we no longer accept CC’s.” I had it with him. Blew off steam. I was like “hard coded, what the heck is that suppose to mean?” Just load it. He said “No” then I proceeded to say “so this is how Target treats it’s customers? By changing it’s policy overnight without letting us know or any lead time. I will no longer shop at your store until you allow me to load with my cards again.” and just left.
Of course some of the responses to that were pretty epic as well – “In my neck of the woods, it is customary to follow up such interactions by torching the store. Maybe tonight? ” 😀
Also:
People might want to consider sending complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) about this. At a minimum, Target/AmEx will be forced to spend a lot of time addressing the complaints filed, and they will see customers are dissatisfied.
Chill people!!!
You mean the $25K of Applebees and Red Lobster GCs I just bought at Kroger can’t be loaded to RB?
That at least was a joke (I think!)
From Frequent Miler:
Some cashiers may ask to check your ID against your form of payment. If that happens you may be out of luck with that cashier (since your gift card probably doesn’t have your name on it). If that happens, try another cashier or another store, or change your legal name to “Gift Card Recipient”. (emphasis mine)
From Travel with Grant (in the comments):
You can still use KEVO to load your CC to meet minimum spend, right?
After a long drawn out comment thread where several people hoped that we had found a hitherto-unknown method of manufactured spending, it turned out that he was actually talking about Kiva.
(SEE ALSO: Kiva – earning points for helping people)
Find any other sources of humor in this oh so sad time? 😀
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Comments on FT and other sites are hilarious. Easy to spot the spoiled brats newbies that didn’t make plans ahead on how to liquidate their thousands of dollars worth of AGCs they just bought. How will they drain $40K AGCs now?
It may sound insensitive but for those who went overboard and ordered AGCs w/o having plans what to do with them just in case CC loads to RB is stopped, I have no pity for them. Their eyes were set on going to Target, loading $2500 per day PER card. They thought it was always that easy. Alas, the door of opportunity closed on May 6 and they were not given advance notice. That’s why they’re calling for a class action suit. Yeah, right!