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.
There’s always going to be free money involved.
For every $50 gift card there’s still that $1.87 you have remaining from your not exactly $50 purchase that’s too much of a hassle to ever use again.
Some places like Costco, Dunkin, etc let you merge balances so you can actually use them. Ones that don’t support it via the website/app usually will do it for you in store or via support channels.
It’s apparently not known that we have made some improvements to the way companies deal with gift cards and store balances. This is thanks to that little appreciated consumer protection bureau. It used to be that they could take monthly fees starting immediately and could have balances expire after a year or any arbitrary block of time.
I’m in Texas. I’ve been cashier in multiple roles, between my entry-level stuff and sometimes having to fill in. I don’t know about the laws elsewhere. Every payment system I’ve ever used had a way that you could split payment, and usually if it was a debit card of any sort, it would just take whatever was left in the account and you’d have a remaining balance, payable any other way. That said, if anyone is ever thinking about getting me a gift card, I just tell them to give me the cash equivalent, it’s more useful than cards.
I wasn’t even going to worry about covering that angle. These days Costco, sheetz, etc all track your balance on your account so for most businesses people would use most often this old time issue with having a few pennies left isn’t actually a problem anymore.
As for the laws, the cfpb is a federal agency. I remember when that was created and I remember what shady shit businesses would play with gift cards to pad their bottom line.