That's the whole trade. Everything below is the detail that decides whether you net points for a dollar of cost or waste an afternoon.

The four moving parts

1. Wait for a fee-waived week A $200 Visa gift card normally costs $207.95 — the $7.95 is an activation fee and it's pure loss. Roughly one week in four, Staples waives it entirely, and Office Depot runs a parallel deal taking $15 off every $300 of face value. Outside those weeks the math doesn't work. The dashboard tells you which week you're in.
2. Pay with a 5x card The Chase Ink Business Cash earns 5% back at office supply stores on the first $25,000 per year. At nine cards — $1,800 — that's 9,000 Ultimate Rewards points in a single transaction. Without a bonus-category card there is no reason to do any of this.
3. Buy in-store, early These deals are almost always in-store only, and stock-outs are the single most common complaint. Go early in the week and early in the day. Bring ID — some stores ask for it when you buy gift cards on a credit card.
4. Liquidate Turn the cards back into money in your bank account. This is the step people underestimate, and it's where the real risk lives. See below.

The strategy behind it

The point isn't the gift card — it's the bonus category. Office supply stores are one of the last widely available 5x categories, and gift cards are the only thing sold there that converts cleanly back into cash. You're buying a $25,000-a-year allowance of 5x spend for roughly a dollar a card in friction.

What that's worth depends entirely on your points valuation. At 1.5¢ per point, 9,000 UR is $135 for maybe forty minutes of work. If you value Ultimate Rewards at 1¢ because you take the cash, it's $90 and considerably less interesting. Run your own number in the calculator rather than trusting anyone's headline figure.

Denomination matters more than you'd think

At Staples the fee is waived outright, so denomination is irrelevant — buy the $200 cards. At Office Depot the discount is $15 per $300 of face value while the activation fee is charged per card. Bigger cards mean fewer fees against the same discount, so two $200 cards beat three $100 cards comfortably.

Liquidation — the part that carries the risk

Visa and Mastercard gift cards are PIN-enabled and behave like debit cards. That's the whole reason any of this is possible.

• Money orders — the workhorse. Walmart and others, roughly $1–2 each, typically capped $500–$1,000 per order. Buy, deposit, done.
• Bill pay — Walmart's customer service desk, plus many utilities that accept debit directly. No fee in some cases.
• Federal tax payments — flat debit fees around $2.50–$2.69 per payment, two payments per processor per tax type. Useful if you owe anyway.
• Plastiq and similar for rent or mortgage — around 2.5%, which usually eats the entire margin. Rarely worth it.
• Just spend them — the zero-risk option. Register the card with your name and address first or online transactions will decline.
• Blackjack at a casino cage — costs about the same as money orders if you play basic strategy correctly, and produces no money-order deposit trail at all. Needs a property that takes prepaid, and the chart memorised.

Bluebird, Serve and Buxx are all dead. Money orders are what's left.

Other things that go wrong

• Stock-outs. Common enough that you should call ahead.
• Some stores won't sell money orders on gift cards at all. Policy varies by location and by cashier.
• Variable-load cards. Staples sells these in some stores and whether the fee gets waived is store-dependent. The fixed $200 cards are the reliable play.
• Dead-on-arrival cards. Rare, but there are reports of cards arriving already registered to someone else, taking about a month to resolve. Keep every receipt until the card is drained.

If you do nothing else

Get an Ink Business Cash, buy nine cards on a fee-free Staples week, and pay a utility bill with them. That's the entire play at its simplest, with no money orders and no bank risk. Scale up only once you've done it once and know your local stores.