Gift cards make great stocking stuffers — just as long as you don’t stuff them in a drawer and forget about them after the holidays.
Americans are expected to spend nearly $30 billion on gift cards this holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation. Restaurant gift cards are the most popular, making up one-third of those sales.
Most of those gift cards will be redeemed. Paytronix, which tracks restaurant gift card sales, says around 70% of gift cards are used within six months.
But many cards — tens of billions of dollars’ worth — wind up forgotten or otherwise unused. That’s when the life of a gift card gets more complicated, with expiration dates or inactivity fees that can vary by state.
Gift cards would cease to exist overnight if that was a requirement.
They hope you forget, it’s free money.
But if every dollar had to be worth a dollar, there would be no space to squeez in operating costs - issuance, accounting, all that jazz.
Sure, they’ll bring in a couple more customers maybe, sure, you can make some money on the interest in the meantime, but it just wouldn’t be worth it IMO.
“Gift cards would cease to exist overnight if that was a requirement.”
Okay 👍
Obviously it’s a hyperbole.
Please share your argument or don’t waste the bandwidth of your lemmy server.