Gift Cards Part Deux

I was listening to the best morning show in the world when they started talking about a topic I have ranted on before. The biggest scam in business. No, not oil companies making a profit (God forbid) or Google buying the US government. No, it’s gift cards. Remember when a gift card was actually a gift certificate? Remember when you spent $18 of the $20 on the certificate and you got two bucks back? Everyone knows why you don’t get change (So you spend more then the card is originally. I have touched on all this before but I neglected to mention another hypocrisy. For accounting purposes (flip your Firefox to youtube if you don’t care about money or math) a business cannot count that gift card as income until it is used. So technically it is not even their money that they are keeping from you. It is stuck in electronic purgatory like the bully holding your lunch money over your head while you jump around like a meth head.

The interesting part is that after two years they are able to start taking a percentage of the balance of cards each month. Needless to say there are millions of dollars of unclaimed gift card balances each year. Of course no one in govt is willing to bring this up as an issue except for California where Arnold has proposed legislation to require balances be returned in cash when they reach a certain level. I am sure that the Dems in the CA assembly will suggest those balances go into the General Fund but that’s a whole other column.