Gift Card Mania
As we’re surrounded with holiday cheer, everyone’s thinking of what gift to buy for whom. Retailers, in their near-infinite wisdom and bountiful cleverness offer us a wonderful solution: the gift card.
Think of the convenience! Your gift recipient can take their shiny red $100 gift card into any Target and spend it on whatever he wants, just as if it was an wrinkly old $100 bill. And you don’t have to worry about picking out an appropriate gift. But what if you want to spend your $100 somewhere else?
It might be pretty, but the gift card is useless anywhere else. On the other hand, the grimy $100 greenback works anywhere. So what does the gift card get you? It’s not safer to mail, because anybody can use it, just like the $100 bill. And did you know it depreciates in value even faster than a Federal Reserve Note?
Not singling out Target here, but retailers actually charge a quarterly fee—a reduction in the value of the gift card—if your recipient doesn’t spend it right away. Eventually, it will expire completely.
I read somewhere that 22 BILLION dollars were spent on gift cards in the US over the “black Friday” weekend. How much more will go toward plastic money over the Christmas shopping season? You realize, of course, that the retailers are earning interest on your money from the time you buy the card until it’s spent. Imagine the interest on that amount of money!
While the value of the US dollar isn’t what it used to be, I’ll take it green over red every time.
