Gift Cards: News, Problems, and Politics
News, Politics, and Problems of Gift Cards — by Catherine Morgan
This is a post I did last January, and updated at the end with recent news.
Gift cards have done for the shopping, what channel changers did for the television. For the younger generation, who may not remember the days of having to get off the couch to change the channel on your television, the gift card is doing for the shopper, what the Wireless Internet has done for the lap-top. Another words, we lived without gift cards before, but we could never go back to the dark days of no gift cards now. There is just no turning back.
It is clear, that gift cards have changed the face of shopping for the better. No more wasting time and energy trying to find a “thoughtful” gift for someone. Just get them a gift card and you’re all set. Everyone is happy, both the gifter and the gifted. And gone are the days of “re-gifting” and the “re-gifter”. In the future, our grand-kids will be watching re-runs of “Seinfeld” in total confusion.
We can not live without gift cards. We all love them. We all buy them. We all use them. Those are just the facts. But, what are the politics? The politics are the “dark-side” of the gift card industry, or what “they” don’t want you to know.
Let me be serious for a minute, after all I did call this post “A SERIOUS LOOK AT THE POLITICS OF GIFT CARDS”. Gift cards are a multi-billion dollar industry. This year consumers will spend more than twenty-five billion dollars in gift cards, but an estimated five to twenty-five percent of these cards will never be used. Leaving the companies to profit enormously, without lifting a finger. According to a recent AP report, Best Buy reported a 43 million dollar profit from cards that were purchased but not used in the last two years. And they are not alone. Millions of us receive gift cards during the holidays, and many of us will never use them.
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