Just to report back. I stopped at another Kroger store and tried the Petco gift cards again... I picked up three variable loads and put $25 on each, and it only took off $10, no glitch for me. Oh well, I used the $10 ones from the other day for some Christmas dog toys, so I got extra credit card points for the grocery store and 2x fuel points on them. I gave the rest to DF's mom, which I had planned... We live with them and it's their dogs, we don't have our own at this time. I just figured it was worth a shot.
Today's plan - we purchased a few things at Best Buy one one AMEX and finished out the rest with Disney gift cards - since the items were gifts or small things we would have purchased anyways, we counted the regular price in our budget and are considering the AMEX offer as $25 off $125 Disney. We have a few gift cards to pick up still, so when we go to pick up the items, we're going to use DF's AMEX offer and do something similar - get what we can for Christmas gift cards, and finish it out with Disney.