I wanted to give everyone an update on my Disney Gift Card purchase at Shoppers, using my PC Financial World Mastercard.
Frankly, it was an absolute PITA. But I guess worth it in the end?
With my Mastercard, I *should* earn 35 points per $1 spent at Shoppers. 15 of those points are earned strictly as PC Optimum (i.e. you don't have to be a Mastercard holder to get them) and 20 of those points are earned as a result of being a PC Mastercard holder. Following?
However, gift cards are not eligible for PC Optimum points (unless you use a Mastercard) so I can only ever get 20 points per $1 spent at Shoppers.
To test how this would all shake out, I bought Disney Gift Cards at Shoppers (it took a while to find them but I did in the end!), enough to cover my Canadian Resident Ticket purchase for my trip in May. I bought 5 x $500 gift cards (which is the most I could load on one card in store) for a total of $2500. At this point, there was a LOT of confusion at the cash register as it seemed to be the most anyone had ever purchased from this store or something?
A manager had to come out and check my ID before authorizing the purchase. I got the cards loaded, saved my receipt, and started watching the PC Optimum app.
And nothing happened. For days. Just when I was starting to worry, I saw that 25,000 points had been deposited, backdated to the date of purchase, as a PC Financial transaction. NOT a Shopper's transaction. And so I waited for the other half of my points to be deposited.
At some point, I saw that 32,000 had been deposited, around the transaction date but not ON the transaction date. I contacted PC Optimum for clarification as to whether these were indeed the second amount of points I was owed, as the app had literally zero information (except for "PC Financial transaction") and because it was for 32,000 and not 25,000 I really didn't know for a fact those were the points. This sent me down a rabbit hole of providing receipts, transaction numbers, being passed to PC Financial, being passed back to Optimum, because literally no one could tell me what the tarnation those points were.
In the end, PC Optimum said "we think those are the points" and because I didn't have a transaction that large during that time window, I kind of have to assume they are. In the meantime, I have upgraded to a PC Financial World Mastercard ELITE, which should increase the points to 30 per $1 (and an additional 15 points for non-gift card purchases) at Shoppers. I'm not thrilled at how this all shook out, but I'm willing to try again to get that 3% discount.
Anyway, TLDR, pack your patience for these types of transactions!