Gift Cards Are Just Stupid

Okay, in some states there are laws that make it mandatory for companies to treat gift cards just like cash. If you live in one, bully for you. I don’t.

As I’m sure most of you know, a gift card is kind of a gamble, in which either you break even (i.e. you get all the money you or someone who likes you paid for) or you lose (the store / establishment in question gets free money). If you don’t spend every red cent on that card or get it handed back to you as cash, then you lost, and somebody just got free money.

As you probably are also aware, most gift cards are “nontransferrable”, a misleading term since of course they’re transferrable one-way; you hand them cash and they hand you a card. But they won’t hand you cash if you give them the card back, unless the law forces them to. Being “nontransferrable” is one of several ways retailers have of “encouraging breakage”, or making sure you don’t get everything out of a card that you put into it. (In other words, “breakage” is a euphemism for “stealing your money”.)

Well, it’s not just retailers now; banks have gotten in on the gift card swindle too. And boy howdy, are they good at it. They don’t just encourage breakage; they set out a nice buffet for it and send it a gold-lettered invitation and prepaid travel voucher.

I got a Charter One gift card for my bonus this year — one of those Mastercard jobs that you can “use anywhere they take Mastercard!” (assuming you can get them to accept it for anything under a ten-dollar purchase of course). Supposedly this makes it slightly less of a ripoff than trading your use-anywhere money for a store-bound card.

But wait! Money also works without charging fees for itself; not so with the Charter One gift card. From the Ultra-Fine-Print pamphlet included with the card, I see that my poor boss got screwed for 3.50 a card up front (”activation fee”) and I will get screwed for 2.50 per month (”maintenance fee”) for every month past the 12th that I have the card.

Gee. What a deal.

I can see the Creepy Sci-Fi Advertisement now: Hey Kids! Special offer! For the low-low price of one hundred dollars, you can now purchase ninety-six-and-a-half dollars of emplasticated money! This special process delicately infuses your money into a piece of plastic with far prettier colors on it than your actual money. Beware, though; this delicate bond will only last a year, after which your money will begin to evaporate into the aether.

Is there some value in a pretty card that I’m unaware of? I mean, somewhere we got fed this idea that that card is worth something more than the money that it represents, even though you will throw the card away as soon as you’re done using the money. If the card was somehow functional beyond its use as money, maybe I could see why I should be paying money for it!

Anyway, gift cards suck. They don’t make it look any less like you didn’t buy a present than giving cash does, and trust me, I have yet to meet a single person who has a problem with just getting cash. You want to dress it up, stick a bow on it. They’re cheap, and your giftee will still get the full amount you want them to.

-PD