(Read this November, 2012 update first: Kroger will discontinue it’s “fuel points” discount at the end of 2012. Sigh. Further update from the future: Kroger is no more in this part of the USA and with its departure from Apex, North Carolina went hiring of challenged individuals. I boycott Harris Teeter when possible.)
Our daughter’s basic high school band expenses are $575 per year, not including trips, dinkles, t-shirts, calendars, and music cds. This year’s trip, a cruise, will cost at least $800. Add to this about $1200 for instruments this year (including an oboe made in France in the late 1930s gotten with a killer deal and refurbished by a local saint), the ongoing cost of instrument reeds and biweekly music lessons, and the cost soon begins to get to the hair-curling level.
Enter Kroger. The area Kroger groceries offer a “magic” gift card that can be used over and over again. All the money put on this particular gift card (actually one each for my wife and me) can be spent on anything they sell, which includes gift cards for other shops and gasoline. Each dollar spent puts a nickel in our daughter’s band account. In addition, each dollar spent on general goods results in a “fuel point,” and each dollar spent on other gift cards results in either two or four fuel points depending on periodic specials. Each 100 fuel points translates to 10 cents discount on gasoline, and one gasoline purchase can fill both our vehicles with a discount of up to two dollars per gallon. On top of all this, Kroger purchases earn a second flavor of “points,” and a few times a year we get $10-20 in coupons redeemable for anything Kroger sells in return for the points. Too bad we can’t feed those coupons through the Kroger card, but we don’t want to overheat their administrative servers with some kind of compounding runaway.
But to give an example of how cool these features can get with Kroger, consider this past North Carolina tax free weekend. We’d been preparing to get our daughter her first PC, carefully searching for a laptop she wouldn’t soon outgrow, and the cost came to about $575. We put the money through the magic Kroger card to get a stack of Best Buy gift cards. This transaction put $29 into the band account and will save about $38 on the next fill up of the two vehicle’s gas tanks. In combination with saving NC sales tax, we made over $100 of effective savings on a $600 computer. Thank you, Kroger. (And thank you, state of North Carolina, and thank you, Best Buy for the $70 discount on the computer).
Update September, 2019: All 14 Kroger stores in this part of North Carolina were closed a few years back. The aspect that hurt the most is the fact that the ones we shopped at made a point of employing people with handicaps of various types (one wonderful lady had grown up deaf, a few staff had some cognitive challenges, etc). Kroger’s remaining stores here (Harris Teeter brand) have no such diversity employment.