Gas Companies Aren't Selling Me Their Credit Card

It seems like all the "rage" now in my city -- every time I fill up my car with gas I get a commercial on the pump screen before they print out my receipt. It always says something like, "You could have saved 5 cents per gallon today if you had used the Shell Credit Card." Yeah, yeah, yeah -- can I just have my receipt?

The reason this may look like a good deal is that while it says "5 cents" some people might translate this into "5 percent." If the card did pay 5 percent, that would be a pretty decent return. But it doesn't offer that -- it offers 5 cents per gallon off.

Let's say a gallon of gas costs $2.60 (I've paid more than this on most recent gas purchases, but I'll go low to help the card companies out). That's a 1.9% discount per gallon. Not bad, but my Schwab Visa gives me 2%. In addition, it gives me 2% off EVERY purchase -- and I buy a whole lot more other stuff on it than gas. Many (most?) of the gas cards pay 1% on non-gas purchases -- even those that do offer (usually for a limited time) 5% back on gas purchases. So the cards aren't really that great of a deal. And yet, I have to endure a commercial every time I fill up.

Could you just give me my receipt, please?

Comments

[MonkeyMonk]

Somewhat related . . . my wife has been a longtime American Express user. Not one of their rebate cards, but the old-school $60/year, points-accruing type. I'v tried to get her to switch to no avail. Over the years she has amassed over 100,000 points and just the other night we looked online to see what the best option was in redeeming them. The results were pretty pathetic.

The conversion rate for most items came to under 0.5 percent return on spending. The best deal we could find was for Home Depot gift cards and even then the return was only 1.2 percent. Even traval (which I thought would be a better deal) was in the sub-1 percent category.

Anybody know of any good deals when redeeming Amex points?

I'll be sticking with my Chase Freedom and Costco Amex cards.

[texashaze]

The Costco AmEx Business card offers 4% on gas. This has saved my family a lot of $$$.

[Chris]

I had a post oin my blog about my local grocery store doing a similar thing - offering a few cents off gas for grocery purchases. This is definitely intended to fool people into thinking it's a better deal than it is.

[MSC]

I have the real 5% off Shell Credit Card from Citibank.

There's a Shell station that matches the price of Sheetz across the street, so I guess I'm getting the cheapest gas in town.

[Budgeting in the Fun Stuff]

We apparently don't have high-tech gas stations - no commercials. :-)

I use my Penfed Visa to get 5% cash back on gas all the time. The cash is credited to your bill every month.

[SWIEHN]

I buy my gas with a Motormart debt card (takes money directly from my account) because: 1. I don't go into debt even for one month and 2. the price of the gas automaticly goes down 6 cents a gallon.

[my2fish]

I also have the real-deal 5% off gas credit card from Shell (and Marathon, actually - have had both for years). I had a good thing for a while, too, when my local Shell station would give me the "cash" price when using the Shell card, saving me an additional 4% or 5%... but they stopped offering that. (BTW, the whole "cash" vs "credit" pricing really grinds my gears.)

For most non-gas spending though, I use my Costco Amex card - decent % back on most things.

cheers, thad

[Old Limey]

The regular Costco/AMEX card gives 3% on Gas and Restaurants, 2% on Travel, 1% on everthing else. However not all merchants take AMEX so you also need a MC or Visa.

[Suba@Wealth Informatics]

Actually if you have kroger (or kroger related stores like Ralphs) you can do better than 5%. It takes very little extra work. Kroger and Shell has a fuel rewards program

http://www.kroger.com/in_store/fuel/Pages/fuel_saver.aspx

You need enough rewards points to get the 10c discount per gallon. I don't buy enough groceries in the grocery store anymore to get that. So what I do is
1) Start of the month buy $200 shell gift cards from Ralphs. I get 5% cash back on groceries so I am not missing out on that reward. And for every $50 in gift card purchase I get 10c off upto 35 gallons, so almost every time I fill, I get 5% back + 10c off every gallon.
2) Just enter my Ralphs rewards # and use the gift cards to pay.

This might not work if you don't use shell. Just thought I will let you know in case you had a kroger and shell near by that has this program or any of your readers do...

[Tim]

My Shell Citi credit card gives me 5% of all shell gasoline purchases, plus 1% on everything else with no annual fee. Pretty good deal if you ask me. I think the 1% may be changing soon though, so I'll switch to Discover for all the "other" purchases when that happens.

[Bill]

Get the BP card...5% on gas, 2% on Travel and 1% on everything else. For first 60 days I believe it is double on all of these.....

[Mark]

I have an Exxon Visa, and it pays me 15 cents per gallon - which IS around 5%. I only use it for gas, but it does pay 1% and 2% on other purchases.

And the Exxon I use matches a no-name station across the street, so I get a pretty good price.

[Chuckles]

I use Amex Blue Cash...after hitting the $6500 spending point (bought and deposited dollar coins from the mint), I now get 5% back on gas, groceries and drug store purchases. Have to wait until the end of the year to get it, but pretty decent. I use Blue Cash with the Schwab Visa, Chase Freedom and Discover More cards to average about 3% back on my purchases.

[MBTN]

This quarter, gas is one of the "Discover More" 5% cash back categories (along with hotels, movies, and theme parks). The catches are that you have to sign up online and you only get 5% on up to $300 of qualified purchases.

[Rob Ward]

We don't actually have a gas credit card but we do use a Speedway rewards card which is just like a grocery store rewards card (Kroger plus card in Ohio). So you could sign up for that instead of the credit card. Not sure if they have Speedway in Michigan though...

On top of that our PNC Visa rewards credit card gives us 4% back on gas. Woohoo!