It’s that time of year again! On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, in between the rampant “big-box” consumerism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, American Express has sponsored “Small Business Saturday“, which I guess is rampant consumerism of a different style 😛
I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but I thought it would be worth a refresher since we’re only a little over 2 weeks away! When I wrote about possibly canceling my Delta Amex card a few days ago, I included a link to my Small Business Saturday post and quite a few people clicked on it, so it indicated to me that there are people still wondering about it
(READ: Free money with Amex Small Business Saturday)
Registration
This week Small Business Saturday is on November 29th. Registration for the promotion begins on Sunday, November 16, and you do have to register your card to take place in the promotion. I’ll be sure to send out a reminder once registration opens. According to the Small Business Saturday terms and conditions, registration should open at midnight MST on Sunday morning (2 a.m. Eastern)
There are 2 ways that I see to maximize savings
- Buy stuff that you need and already are planning to buy.
- Buy gift cards ($10 at a time)
We did the latter last time – we had 5 American Express cards and I bought 5 $10 gift cards to a local movie theater which we used a few weeks later to take the family out to the movies.
Statement Credits
Typically, American Express gives out statement credits if you shop at a participating small business with your American Express card. 2 years ago it was $25 per card, and last year it was dropped to only $10. This year the credit is $10, but you can earn it 3 times for each card that you have.
Cards of authorized users count, as well as Bluebird, REDbird (The Target reloadable card) and Serve, so depending on how many cards you have, you could be looking at several hundreds of dollars.
Find a Small Business
The easiest way to find a small business that is participating is to use the Shop Small Now map, which is at http://shopsmallnow.americanexpress.com/ShopSmall
Here are some examples of Small Businesses in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Again, I don’t find the map super easy to use, but it is an option. Or if you have a particular small business in mind, you can use the ShopSmall map to verify that it is participating.
Combining with Dining promotion
FrequentMiler had an interesting post the other day. There is a targeted offer that will give you 7500 AAdvantage miles with 10 dines of $40 or more, and he suggested combining that with Small Business Saturday. If you used 4 Amex cards (*3 times each) to buy $40 of gift cards. The gift cards would end up only costing you $30 due to Small Business Saturday, and you’d end up earning nearly 10,000 miles.
One problem is that the terms and conditions of the dining offer state that you can only do 1 restaurant dine per day per restaurant, so instead of getting 10 gift cards at the same restaurant, you’d have to find 10 different restaurants that both participate in Small Business Saturday AND the AAdvantage Dining program.
If you haven’t registered for AAdvantage Dining before, you can sign up and get 2000 AAdvantage miles as a bonus for signing up once you complete just 1 $30 dine.
Do you have plans for Small Business Saturday?
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I read terms as both Serve and Bluebird will be eligible for this. Read carefully.
I agree that Bluebird and Serve are eligible – did I not say that in the post?
I have a local restaurant in my area that gives a $10 bonus for every $50 in load on a gift card. My game plan was to swipe my family’s combined 7 cards a total of 21 times ($10/load = $210 plus $10*4 “bonus” = $250 total).
My question is whether or not **all 3** Amex swipes on each card can be from the same “small business” (Or will I unwittingly end up getting the first swipe reimbursed for $10 and then paying for the second 2 swipes?)
(Note that my concern is totally unrelated to the AA targeted offer you mentioned)
Thanks for the great post!
Last year I bought 5 $10 gift cards from the same local movie theater and got the statement credit for all of them. Like any promotion, you’ll want to watch your statements and make sure the credits show up and call / email Amex. If you want to do a live chat, be sure to check out my post on how to get a live chat at Amex.
Cool – thanks for the info!
Amazon now has Amazon Local Register for small business to collect the payments. If I wanted to use that and the american express cards how would I set that up
Hmm Gail that’s a good question that I’m not sure about. I believe I have head some people getting shut down for using that to process payments to themselves. Personally I’ve not dabbled in that.