Mother's Day triple-dip

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I'm trying to stay ahead of schedule on things right now given how busy May is going to be. To that end, I just ordered a nice bouquet of flowers in a silver vase for my mom for Mother's Day. She and my dad live in an RV so ephemeral gifts are essential given their limited living space.



I did some checking for Amex Offers and found one:
I also looked at evreward.com to see if there were some additional points I could earn from a shopping portal bonus. Lo and behold, United's portal is offering 25 points per dollar. Furthermore, United's spring promotion has point bonuses that will stack on top of this if you meet the cumulative spending thresholds.

After going through the checkout process I realized that you have to use a promo code to get the points, and the promo code is mutually exclusive with Shoprunner free shipping. Hmm. Math time. Do I want 1500 points ($60 x 25 per dollar) or do I want to pay $14.99 for shipping? Since I know exactly which reward I'm going to try to use these points for, I know i'm going to get around 3¢ each for them, so it's definitely smarter to take the miles instead of the free shipping.


💁‍♂️ TIP: The main shopping cart screen has the Shoprunner Sign In/Sign Out link



When I finally got to the checkout screen, I noticed that they offer Amex Express Checkout, where there's currently a promo running for 2 extra points per dollar spent, so this should net me 210 points. One gotcha with the Amex Express Checkout: it really wants you to use your points to pay for the flowers (at a terrible redemption rate), so make sure you don't do that!


All told, this should net me ≈ 3085 points, which make this gift essentially free. Everybody wins!



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