Author Archives: Gomanson

Card Review: Wells Fargo Propel

Wells Fargo’s flagship points earning credit cards are the Propel World and Propel 365. The Propel World has a $175 annual fee with a 40,000 point sign-up bonus, and the Propel 365 has a $45 annual fee with a 20,000 point sign-up bonus. There are some differences in category bonuses as well, but the annual fee and initial bonus are the biggest differences. This review is for the card my wife and I have, the Propel World.

Basic Stats
– Issuer: Wells Fargo
– Logo: AMEX
– Points earned: Wells Fargo Rewards
– 1 pt per dollar on all purchases
– 2 pt per dollar on hotel stays
– 3 pt per dollar on airfare
– Foreign transaction fee: no
– Chip: yes
– Annual fee: $175

Current sign-up bonus
– 40,000 bonus points after $3000 spend in 3 months
– 1st year annual fee waived
– 0.0% APR for 12 months

Wells Fargo’s Propel World and Propel 365 cards have received relatively little attention on the card blogs. The Propel World is worth potentially $630 in bonuses alone. The card has a pretty stiff annual fee, and some people have reported trouble getting approved if they don’t have any relationship with Wells Fargo. But I think the biggest reason this card is underplayed on the major card blogs is that there doesn’t seem to be any card application referral links. Ok, so that’s a bit cynical, but it might have some truth to it.

After hitting the bonus spend you’ll have at least 43,000 points. Some flyertalk users report waiting over 2 months for the bonus points to post to their accounts. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you don’t enjoy maximizing complex redemption schemes) the best way I found to spend the points is to simply take the cash. Points can be redeemed for $0.01/pt in $25 increments so 43,000 points are worth $425. You have the choice of taking the cash as a statement credit or having it transferred to your Wells Fargo bank account.

Orphan Points

Points leftover after redeeming for cash (i.e. any balance less than 2,500 pts) aren’t casualties of war as I thought they would be. Some helpful folks at the flyerfalk forum on this card brought up the fact that you can buy gift cards with any combination of points and dollars. In my example I bought a $25 Subway gift card for 1,277 points and $12.23. Since I would have spent $25 at Subway eventually anyway, I view the points used as basically being converted to cash.

The Airline Bonus

Besides having no foreign transaction fee and a few other minor travel perks, the Propel World’s most valuable benefit is the incidental airline expense reimbursement. The card will reimburse up to $100 in airline fees every card member year. This pretty much includes anything charged to an airline other than airfare. When I got the card there was hardly any information online about which purchases count as an airline purchase.

– My first test was a miles transfer fee with American Airlines. The whole fee was reimbursed.

– For my second test I purchased a wi-fi connection on an overseas flight on American Airlines. As I suspected, the purchase was charged to T-mobile, not the airline. This was not reimbursed.

– My third test was an in-flight food and beverage purchase aboard an Air Canada flight. This was not reimbursed and my statement showed the charge coming from a third party food vendor company.

Although in-flight purchases like meals and wi-fi may seem like it would count toward the airline charge reimbursement benefit, be careful to check whether or not it’s actually the airline charging you, or a partner company. The primary way I have seen reported to take advantage of this benefit is to buy a gift card from an airline. There have been some mixed reports of this method too, however, so do your homework before you make your purchase. Flyertalk has a thread on the card, which contains many reports of using the airline benefit.

One last note on the airline benefit: for those who want to really maximize this card’s benefits, there are reports of people getting the $100 airline reimbursement, waiting until their anniversary date and getting another $100 reimbursement for their second year of card membership, and then cancelling the card before the annual fee posts. Of course if you plan on keeping the card and paying the annual fee, you have a whole year to get the benefit again.

My experience with the Wells Fargo Propel World

My wife and I both applied for the Propel as the AMEX part of a “big 3” application round, along with Citi and Chase cards. She was instantly approved and I got “pending.” I called the next day and after some verifications, the rep approved the account.

The cards came about a week later in a some pretty nice packaging. We each got an authorized user card for the other’s account to help coordinate hitting both bonus spends. Around the time of the first payment due date, I was pleasantly surprised to find out about the 0% APR period, which I had failed to notice earlier. These turned into our go-to cards when our cash flow was lagging, and we soon intentionally racked up balances that would sit there until the end of the promotional 0% period.
Near the end of our first year with the Propel, as the $175 annual fee loomed ahead, it was pretty easy to determine that keeping the card was not worth the fee. Both of my attempts at using the incidental airline benefit on my card had failed (see above) so I wanted to capture the value of this benefit before closing the card. A $100 American Airlines gift card did the trick. I also used the rest of my orphan points on a Subway gift card, squeezing the last bit of value from this card. Before the statement with my annual fee closes, I’m going to try and get another $100 AA gift card for my 2nd year airline benefit.

Nicoleen’s card already had a few airline mile transfer fees reimbursed and I was too lazy to check her statements to see how much was left of the $100 benefit. Additionally, I had her statament closing date wrongly recorded and by the time she was going to call and cancel the card, her annual fee had posted to her account. I discovered this while at work and I panicked, directing her to call right away and try to get the fee removed. She did so, and only after I received the news did I realize I had forgotten to have her get a $100 airline gift card for the 2nd year reimbursement benefit. Oh well…we missed out on a free $100 in airfare but still avoided the $175 annual fee. And all that was on top of the $450+ in value we got from her card; so yeah…I can’t really complain 🙂

Should you get this card?

Yes. Although Wells Fargo Rewards points are non-transferable and basically only worth the cash, $425 in points for a $3k spend is a good value any day of the week! Add the airline benefit and a little extra spending and you’re up to a $650 value for getting this card.

So where would the Propel fit into an overall card strategy? Of course that depends on your situation, but here are some things to consider:

– The bonus has been the same since this card’s inception so timing (vis a vis an elevated bonus offer)probably doesn’t matter
– All reports indicate your chances of being approved are higher after having some history with Wells Fargo. A few months with a free checking account might do the trick.
– If your planned app round already has a Citi, Chase, and/or Barclay card, this could fit the AMEX role.
– If you know you’ll be paying for some miles transfers or purchases, having the incidental airline expense reimbursement benefit on this card can cover those costs, up to $100/year.
– If you currently don’t have a card that waives foreign transaction fees and you have international travel on your horizon, the Propel might be good to have.

Click here to apply for the Propel World AMEX from Wells Fargo

Menards Free Stuff – The Verdict

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Over the course of a 2-year experiment, I “bought” almost $5000 in free-after-rebate merchandise from Menards. Two garage sales and a flea market later, it’s time to analyze the data: Does it really work? Was it worth it? How much did I make? Read on to find my answers…

The Menards rebate system has been one of the major tactics I have posted about on this site. As you can read on the About Me page, a few years ago I was unemployed and looking for creative ways to make money and/or get free stuff. I stumbled upon the Menards mail-in rebate program that frequently features free-after-rebate (FAR) items in their weekly ads.

Through some testing I found that you can use the in-store rebate checks to buy more FAR items, effectively recycling the original money over and over. When you want to end the chain reaction, just use the remainder of the rebate checks on purchases you would have made anyway, and voila! You just got all that stuff for free. A more detailed overview of the tactic can be found here.

Many times ad flyers overlap, making for pretty decent hauls.

MY EXPERIMENT

As soon as I confirmed some basic plausibility (e.g the checks can be used on anything; even new FAR items) of the system I decided to run it like an experiment. I love quantifying value (hence this website!) and I wanted to see how much one could actually make by getting this free stuff and hopefully selling it secondhand (or using it). Here were my parameters:

Get only and all items where the rebate amount matches or exceeds the purchase amount.*
Get the max quantity of items eligible for the rebate offer.**
Sell items at 50-75% discounts from retail (to move product fast).

*There were some exceptions, as discussed here.
**In rare cases there were not enough items in stock. Also in rare cases, there were FAR items with no limit. In this case I would get as many as I presently had rebate checks to cover.

And some assumptions:

Stamps for sending in rebates, garage sale signage, and flea market fees are counted as expenses.
Travel costs to and from the store do not count as expenses as these cost were negligible in my situation.

THE RESULTS

Acquiring stuff
After 2 years (July 7th, 2013 – July 5th, 2015) the total retail value of the FAR items I purchased was $4946.46. Without the few restrictions I put on my purchasing, this figure would have easily been over $5000. This puts the total amount of stuff you could acquire for free at around $2500/year.

The furthest “in the hole” I was (i.e. the most spending done before getting some rebates back) was $1039.04. However, I happened to start during a long rebate delay period, which seems to happen in the middle of every summer. Once I got the ball rolling and got some rebates in the mail, it seemed like around $400 was all that was needed to perpetually re-use the rebates. I have since used about $850 in rebates for non-experiment purchases at Menards, leaving only $185 to be paid back (by using rebates to make personal/family purchases I would have made anyway).

Selling stuff
In August of 2013 we had a garage sale. I only had about $350 in product at the time, and selling it around 50-75% off retail price I made around $50. We had a second garage sale a year later and I made closer to $155. My big plan to liquidate a lot of inventory came in June 2015 when I got a booth at a flea market in my area. A full report of that event can be found here. At the flea market my Menards stuff netted $201.81.

When anyone in my house would take any product out of inventory for personal use, I would charge the family my sale price for the item (No, I didn’t actually demand $1.50 cash from my wife when she took a spray bottle of carpet cleaner! This was just done on my tracking spreadsheet.)

Between both sales, the flea market, and the few self-purchases, my total revenue to date is $405.31. I estimate I still have 70-75% of my total inventory from the 2 years, which would suggest I have the potential to make another $945-1215 in revenue.

ANALYSIS

My data lends itself to two main conclusions:

The system works. You can make money doing this.
It’s probably not worth it.

The system works
You can make money doing this. All of the details of the rebate system work out so that you can perpetually buy more and more free stuff with the store’s own rebate checks. Since Menards has a lot of generally needed products, it’s not hard to “pay yourself back” when you’re ready to stop the rebate churning. The rebate program is very forgiving about mail-by dates and the ad flyers are online, making it easy to find the deals. If you have a Menards close to where you live or if you frequently drive past one, getting the merchandise and sending in rebate forms can be accomplished without much extra time or hassle.

Selling the items also works. A lot of the products are cheap, expendable items that people generally use: paint brushes, cleaning supplies, gloves, hand tools, kitchen gadgets, etc. Of course some items sell better than others but in general, the stuff goes. I tried putting a few of the higher volume items on craigslist, but never got any bites. Impulse buys at garage sales and flea markets seems to be the best bet to offload your free stuff.

It’s probably not worth it
I just explained how the system works and that you can make money. So why do I say it’s probably not worth it? The answer is simple: efficiency. No one part of the process is overly onerous but looking at it as a whole, it is just too much work for the return.

But it’s close. In fact, until I packed it all up and brought it to the flea market, it still felt like it was worth my while. But once the volume of stuff became hard to physically manage, getting it moved and set up properly to sell became a big project. If one half of the program -getting the stuff or selling the stuff- could be cut out of the equation I would probably say it was worth the effort. But as it stands, for me it is not.

That’s not to say it isn’t worth it for everyone. For someone who spends their summers hanging out at flea markets anyway, or someone who lives on a busy intersection, the selling part might be a lot less trouble than it was for me. In this case the scales could be tipped enough that the value exceeds the costs.

Another idea would be to limit purchases to only very small items like drill bit sets, paint brushes, saw blades, etc. and to avoid the gallon jugs of cleaning supplies and mini blinds, for example. Doing this would cut way down on the hassle of storing and transporting the stuff. It would also reduce the total number of trips to the store.

MOVING FORWARD

I have forced myself to take a break from Menards free stuff. It can be pretty addicting to walk out of a home improvement store every week or two with 5 full bags of free stuff. I quit cold turkey and knowingly missed some good deals. I need to liquidate more inventory before I even think about getting more free stuff. I might give craigslist a second try or put a few items on amazon. If nothing else I will do another flea market early next summer.

When I am ready to start churning rebates at Menards again I will change my tactics. I now know which items sell the best and which ones are a pain to store and transport. I think a smaller, leaner rebate churning program at Menards could make almost as much profit as my experiment did, but with a fraction of the hassle.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to leave Menards Free Stuff as a featured value tactic on the site. Maybe some reader will be in a better position to sell the product, and would therefore find the tactic valuable. Maybe someone will find a different retailer or website where the same tactic could be applied.

Buying almost $5000 of merchandise for free was sure fun. It’s time to ease up for now, but something tells me I haven’t sent in my last pile of rebate forms…

Weekly Update (September 30, 2015)

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This update covers about two weeks and includes my personal monthly points and miles update, a preview of some brewing travel plans, a report from a reader, and my current credit card usage decisions.

First, a look into my personal tracking. Since the previous update I have pumped $19.01 in free gas. For 2015 the percentage of my commute gas that’s free has dropped below 17%, mostly due to rising fuel prices. I recently tallied our monthly points and miles earnings. Here are the results:

earned 9,629 airline miles
earned 7,253 Chase Ultimate Rewards
earned 96 ‘other’ points

Travel News
I’m getting the itch to plan a trip. We don’t have any travel plans on the books right now and it’s starting to bug me! I might have something in the works for Europe next summer, but what really gets me excited is the prospect of another tropical, lazy vacation with Nicoleen. We’re exploring the idea of a 6 night stay on Maui sometime next year. If we play our cards right (and I do mean cards), we should be able to get all 6 nights at top tier resorts for free. Of course the plan would be to get the flights for free as well. I’ll write more about this plan as it develops, but here’s a teaser of the place we have our eyes on:

Value Tactics Reader Reports
ValueTactics reader Derek reports paying just $561 for $2,984 worth of airfare! He’s flying his family of 4 to Grand Cayman Island and he accomplished this awesome deal by using the value tactic outlined in this post from onemileatatime. Nice work, Derek, and have a great trip!

Credit Card News
Nicoleen is still working on the awesome promotion on her American Airlines Aviator Red by Barclay for 15,000 AAdvantage miles for spending $500 each month in September, October, and November. I had been taking advantage of the “spend $1000, earn 1000 extra” bonus offer valid each billing cycle on my Citi AAdvantage card, but I recently got a better offer:

That’s 3x miles (vs. 2x on the 1000/1000 deal) on categories I’ll easily hit the bonus limit on, PLUS there’s no $1000 minimum per month. I’ll definitely be using this card until the bonus limit has been met. Based on my experience, it seems like this Aviator Red from Barclay (previously the U.S. Airways Barclaycard) is becoming a clear front-runner when it comes to periodic promotional bonuses. This is a targeted bonus, however, and not everyone gets the same offers. I was notified of this one via e-mail.

Now you’re updated. Go employ some Value Tactics!

Weekly Update (September 15, 2015)

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I had a lot going on this week at home and at work, so there’s not much to update. I only filled up once with gas, so I saved $2.18 in gas since the last update. I’ve been doing a lot of home remodeling projects and car repairs recently. Saving money on labor when possible by doing repairs oneself is a simplistic value tactic. Of course it takes time to do your own work but it’s also satisfying to do your own work sometimes, so that adds some value.

New Posts this Week
No new posts this week; too busy!

Credit Card News
We are spending toward 2 different bonus offers at the moment, both for American Airlines miles. I got a retention offer on my Citi AAdvantage card a few months ago where I get 1000 bonus miles for every statement in which I have at least $1000 net spending. I wasn’t working on any other bonuses so I decided to take advantage of that offer last month.

The retention offer was good for the next 16 statements. ValueTactics reader Nidakeed reports success in stacking these bonuses when getting the same offer two years in a row. During the 3-4 months of overlap, you will earn 2000 bonus miles on the >$1000 monthly spend.

The other offer we’re working on is one I previously mentioned on Nicoleen’s Barclay Aviator Red card. She gets 15,000 bonus miles if she spends $500 or more in September, October, and November. Piece of cake and a lot of bonus miles!

Now you’re updated. Go employ some Value Tactics!

Weekly Update (September 08, 2015)

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The year is 2/3 over and there is over $425 more in my pocket than if I had not used the free gas tactics. At this rate I’ll hit $600 for sure! In the last week and a half I saved $35.87 spread over 4 trips to the pump.

In the last weekly update I showed you all the free Menards stuff available at the moment. I was at the store getting some remodeling supplies this weekend and I decided to get the 4 free stick lighters. I figured we could always use some of those around the house…..or is this what me starting to fall off the wagon looks like?

New Posts this Week
– Flea Market Round Up is a report on the flea market I was set up at earlier this summer. I went for one Saturday with the goal of selling as much Menards free stuff as I could.

Website News
In a long-overdue update, I refreshed the Results Tracker on the left side bar to reflect recent data. All of the results you see on that side bar were accomplished since August 2012 when I got my first premium credit card, the Chase Sapphire Preferred.

A few readers have requested a noobie guide they can send their interested friends and family to. I think it’s a great idea and it’s a feature that all the similar websites have, so I’m going to make that a priority in the coming week or two.

Now you’re updated. Go employ some Value Tactics!

Flea Market Round Up

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BACKGROUND

Earlier this summer, as I mentioned in the June 16 weekly update, I hauled my empire of acquired stuff to Swappers’ Meet flea market in Wright County, MN. The goals were to reduce volume and make some profit. I had some random items to sell, including the balls and pumps mentioned in a previous post, but the majority of my wares were the fruits of my Menards free stuff tactic.

Our display tables at the flea market. 90% of the items for sale were Menards free-after-rebate items.

Over the previous two years I had bought about $5000 worth of free-after-rebate items from Menards. Of course the “street value” is quite a bit lower. I priced most of the items at 20-50% of retail value. My philosophy on second-hand pricing is to try to find the sweet spot where it’s high enough to make it worth my while, but where it’s low enough where price is basically eliminated as a factor in a buyer’s thought process. To give you an idea on how much stuff I had up for sale, my dad’s Chevy Tahoe, a 4X8′ trailer, and the bed of my friend’s truck were all packed full.

SETUP

Swappers’ Meet is one of the biggest flea markets within easy driving distance and is open Saturdays during the summer. I had only been to a few flea markets before this, so I did a lot of research online to make sure I didn’t break any rules, got their on time, got a good spot, etc. We got there at sundown on Friday (July 14) and found what seemed to be a good spot right across from one of the permanent food buildings. Apparently the regulars can get fussy if newbies like us “steal their spot,” but we never encountered anyone hostile.

We set up two 12×12′ canopies and half a dozen tables and started unboxing our items. Since a lot of my stuff was new, in box, and from a retail store, having a pegboard to hang the packages on was a great way to display several items in a small amount of floor space. Lesson learned: next time have more pegboards.

We continued to set up for half the night, and tried to get 2-3 hours of fitful sleep in the back of our respective vehicles. As soon as the sky began to lighten, cars started rolling in and early shoppers started perusing our mostly-set-up spread. As the morning wore on, it got busier and busier. We didn’t inflate one of the giant soccer balls until a little before noon. Having something so huge and unusual out there really helped draw people in. There were customers who probably wouldn’t have even stopped by if they hadn’t noticed the soccer ball. We also didn’t sell a single ball or pump until we had the display one inflated and up front. Lesson learned: put unusual or interesting items up front to draw people in.

RESULTS

It seemed like a busy day to me but according to some others we talked to it was a relatively slow Saturday. Things really started winding down around 2:00 pm and most vendors were packed up and gone by 4:00. We did $295.70 in total revenue, with the following breakdown:

205.75 in Menards stuff
74.50 in balls and pumps
12.25 in my personal wares (non-Menards)
3.20 in toys (my kids had sent some along)

The entrance fee was $15, which we split proportionately among all of the above-listed categories. Because our revenue was almost $300, I consider the fee almost negligible.

As far as what sold well: some of my predictions were correct and some were wrong. I rightly guessed that the kitchen supplies and plastic tumblers would sell well. I thought more of the hand tools and LED lights would sell. The paint brushes were popular as expected, but I sold almost no 3″ brushes and almost sold out of the 2″ angle brushes (opposite of how I had stocked up). I was pleasantly surprised that I sold a few gallon jugs of deck wash, but I sold none of the driveway degreaser jugs. Of course all of the American flags sold 🙂

All said I offloaded 6 boxes of stuff. Not a huge volume reduction but a welcome one. I consider the flea market a moderate success. If there was no setup or tear-down involved, and I could simply drive out there every Saturday and start selling, it would definitely be a worthwhile method to get the Menards stuff sold. As it stands though, with the effort of moving/unpacking/packing up all the merchandise, it’s probably not a very efficient use of time. More analysis on this will be forthcoming when I write my Menards experiment analysis.

Weekly Update (August 29, 2015) Plus Baby!

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Ok, so once again a weekly update covers more than the last week. But this time I had a good excuse for being late. On Tuesday night Nicoleen gave birth to our 5th child, Leonie, a happy baby girl! Good news for the family, but ouch! the gas savings really suffered this week as we didn’t have time to use our $25 Tuesday coupon while getting gas on the way to the hospital. Oh well, you win some; you lose some. And this time we won big with a good delivery, healthy mom, and cute baby girl!

Baby Leonie, born August 25th, weighing in at 6 lb. 14 oz., and with a length of 20.5″

As it stands, I saved $9.55 in gas in the past week and a half. On Sunday I overcame a huge test of my will power. I was able to resist buying any free Menards stuff even though there was a major haul opportunity. Three separate flyers listed free-after-rebate items at Menards, 2 of which are still active as of this writing:

There are also several new ads starting tomorrow with free-after-rebate (FAR) items including: hats & t-shirts, cleaning supplies, coffee scoops, picture hanging kits, stick lighters, and American flags. This late summer rally has disproved my hypothesis that FAR items are slowing down in Menards’ marketing strategy. Of course you can always stay on top of current Menards ad flyers at their website.

It’s the spreadsheet-updating part of the month for me, and here’s our points and miles report:

Redeemed 5,000 Wells Fargo Rewards for $50 cash
earned 680 airline miles
earned 3,040 hotel points
earned 1,953 Chase Ultimate Rewards

New Posts this Week
– First Class to Europe – Anniversary Trip 2015 is the outline and table of contents of our summer trip reports from our anniversary trip. Check back to this post for links to the trip reports for various parts of the vacation as I post them.
– American Airlines Flagship Lounge – Chicago (ORD) is a review of the first lounge we visited on our first class itinerary to Europe. It was an awesome lounge, as I think you’ll see in this post!
– American Airlines First Class ORD – JFK is the review of the first class flight we took as part of our grueling (but free!) itinerary.

Credit Card News
We’re in sort of a stagnation period as far as cards go. It’s been a challenge deciding which card to use for what. I will almost certainly cancel my Wells Fargo Propel in October and I currently have 1300 or so Wells Fargo Reward points accumulated. The lowest redemption level for cash is $25 for 2500 points. So, do I put $600 in gas (2x points on gas station purchases = 1200 pts) on that card just for a $25 redemption? It doesn’t seem like a good deal, and it isn’t, but I also really hate having effectively unusable points balances just hanging there. The other option is to redeem points for mp3s at about 150 pts per download.

I got a targeted offer yesterday for the 50,000 mile Chase Southwest personal card, which I will likely not apply for at this time.

Nicoleen got a great offer in the mail a few days ago for her Barclay Aviator card which earns American Airlines miles. If she spends at least $500 in each month of September, October, and November, she’ll get an additional 15,000 bonus miles! That’s a deal we’ll definitely make sure we take advantage of.

Travel News
I have nothing on the books, and that’s very sad. I have a free weekend night certificate good at 99% of all Hilton properties in the world that expires December 20th. I was going to go with a friend for a sweet 36 hour mini-vacation to Chicago to stay at the $400+/night Waldorf Astoria but we’re still working out the details. If that doesn’t happen I’ll probably be taking a segment of my family to the Embassy Suites in St. Paul for a random weekend night. It’s not the Waldorf, but at least I’d be able to drink away my sorrow at not getting a more valuable certificate redemption at the Embassy Suites’ complimentary cocktail hour.

Now you’re updated. Go employ some Value Tactics!

American Airlines First Class ORD – JFK

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Our flight from Chicago (ORD) to New York (JFK) was delayed on the tarmac, which made me nervous about making our connection to the “important” flight, the transatlantic on American’s semi-new 777-300ER. The estimated delay went from 45 minutes to 5 hours back to 35 minutes, for an eventual departure between 1 and 2 hours late.

The first class cabin in the Boeing 737-800 was about what you’d expect on a long-ish regional domestic flight. The seats up front were in a 2-2 configuration as opposed to the 3-3 in economy. The seats were comfortable and the seats we selected, 6E and 6F, in the last row of the cabin afforded us a semi-private feeling.

Besides more legroom and more comfortable seats, the first class seating on our American Airlines 737-800 offered the unanticipated benefit of some extra in-flight shelf space. In addition to the normal fold out tray table, our drinks and small electronic devices were welcomed by several mini trays. These were surprisingly useful and convenient; your personal space bubble isn’t invaded by a big slab tray when all you want to do is set your drink down. They were also, as Nicoleen pointed out, very cute. (As cute as a piece of aircraft seat hardware can be I suppose.)

Yes, that’s a super old Blackberry phone. I use it as an mp3 player)

Shortly after take-off we were offered hot nuts. I had read about this American Airlines specialty and was always confused why people even bother mentioning this little snack. Well, now I know why! The heated mixed nuts are surprisingly more yummy than room temperature mixed nuts. Besides the increased yumminess, being served something warmed up that’s normally just thrown into a ramekin makes you feel pampered 🙂 (It’s the little extras, ya know? Like crushed ice in urinals…sorry you miss out on that little joy of life, ladies.)

The meal choices were hot pasta or a cold chicken salad. I had pre-ordered the chicken online, and Nicoleen opted for the pasta. If I were a more experienced traveler, I would have remembered the general rule of thumb for cheap food: Never order the meat when there’s another option available. The salad was pretty good, but the cold lemon chicken was, well . . . nasty. I suppose it didn’t help that I was still stuffed from the lunch I had in the Flagship Lounge at ORD. Nicoleen enjoyed the pasta.

The “cold chicken salad” was actually cold chicken AND a salad.

Overall
While I would never pay the extra miles or cash for a first class seat on this short a flight, as part of a longer itinerary it was sure nice to have the upgraded seats and service. The little perks like early boarding and disembarking, complimentary in-flight drinks, a more private in-flight bathroom, and of course the hot nuts made our otherwise grueling itinerary (24 hours of travel including 3 layovers) much more tolerable; even enjoyable.