A gift card is an interest-free loan to the vendor.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Gift cards are just inferior fake money locked to one store.
With a quite high probability that the loan is never asked back.
Do people actually lose/forget about gift cards?
All the time.
47% of American adults have unused gift cards. The average value per person is $187, and the total value of these unspent funds in the US annually is approximately $23 billion.
Higher-income individuals are most likely to have unredeemed gift cards, with 62% of this demographic reporting unused cards.
Nearly 29% of Americans have kept a gift card so long that it expired, and 25% have lost at least one gift card.
I think that's why companies sell gift cards. They get money and half the time don't have to actually give away any merchandise
They don't expire in Canada
🤣 TIL
Yeah. People lose pretty much anything a lot. And if you have a card to a place you never go to, or don't even have nearby it can easily be forgotten after a while.
A lot of it, though, is having just a few cents left on the card and then just tossing it because it's not worth saving. When added up, that's a lot of money just being thrown away.
Some gift cards are also not a very good fit. I know that from personal experience ;)
Money first, stuff later = gift card
Stuff first, money later + extra money = credit card
If you can pay your statement balance on time, then there is no “+ extra money”.
~That is often much easier said than done.~
You mean less money right? Most credit cards give you 1-2% back.
If you pay your bills on time, you can take advantage of that. You can think of it as a tiny discount, but the credit card company thinks of you as dead weight.
However, those companies also have clever mathematicians who have figured out how much to give you back and how much interest to demand from the people who don’t pay their bills on time. The house always wins.
The house wins as a whole, sure.
But on an individual level, if you are smart about it you’ll spend less than you would with other payment methods.
Exactly
It’s considered tacky to just give people cash, but that would honestly be a better practice.