Even if I get gift cards to places I don’t normally shop, I have never been able not to find something. Yes, Best Buy is expensive, but they have small-ticket items that I still can use, so I buy those. I got $10 to Pier One once – I got a pair of mugs (that I have used quite a bit!).

But I try to be a glass-half-full kind of person. I am more likely to get use from a gift card to a place I don’t normally shop than a generic gift (I don’t like lotions or most scented candles, and I have, in the past, gotten them by the ton).

If you really need to get it out of your system, go make disparaging comments on random message boards.

Best Wishes,
D4L

Yes FrugalBabe, this is clearly the differentiating factor. Most people feel that money is a tool that can be used to achieve their goals and dreams and therefore serve to make them happy.

Clearly, achieving these goals and dreams requires the spending of said money which you actually hate to do. I’m pretty sure that makes you quite different.

This is just a simple accounting issue. When someone gives you money and you give them “nothing” then you don’t have revenue, you have a liability. If I give you $30 of inventory and you give me $50 in cash, then I have $20 in profit and $50 in revenue. The inventory is come and gone and the cash leftover is profit, but basically we’ve made an exchange.

If I buy a gift card, I’ve given you $20 and you’ve just given me an IOU (in the form of a gift card), but we haven’t made an exchange, somewhere down the line you’re legally going to owe something to holder of the gift card, so it’s actually a debt or a liability and therefore can’t be counted as revenue.

As to all of the gift card vs. cash naysayers, here’s where I love gift cards: services & consumables. If you’re a Starbucks addict or you have a favorite salon or a favorite food joint, then I’ll happily get you a GC for that place. It’s also good for “known expenses”, if you’ve just moved and I know that you need dishes, then buying you a GC to homewares store will come in handy.

Some posters have mentioned the use of GCs over cash to force a “purchase” which actually sounds sensible, if a little controlling.

Of course, as evidenced by SC: it was a restaurant out of my budget, even with a gift card
gift cards are not the panacea. In fact a badly chosen gift card is really no better than a badly chosen gift.

I sometimes save up my gift cards for when I want to go on a shopping spree and I’d recently been hoarding Home Depot gift cards (I used to get reward cards where I worked) to purchase a new refrigerator. Well, it turned out that having these cards hoarded came in handy when someone broke into my house a few weeks back and I needed a new front door – the refrigerator’s gone, but I didn’t have to shell out any cash for the door. (and no, I didn’t file a claim on my HO policy, the cost of doing that for a small claim ends up costing you more in the long run).

So yes, for me and my family, holidays and birthdays have become an “exchange of the gift card” day – and it works for us.

I don’t see any reason why I should give my peers gift cards instead of cash though. The only time I have done this in the past is the case of one friend who’s spending habits I did not trust and I wished that he would spend it at a store where he could get something useful rather than pissing it away at this gaming store he often attended.

Was that just for stores or did that include restaurant gift cards as well? That’s what I usually give my parents and I know those always get spent!

Also, if you’re looking to do some heavy duty shopping at Home Depot or Lowes, buy a gift card from eBay and save yourself some dough.

A million thanks for your tip! Never thought of doing it that way before. Now I can use up a bunch of these debit gift cards with $1 and $2 balances.

Gracias.

I like gift cards if they are from a place that I go regularly. But, it annoys me if someone asks what I’d like, and I say “gift card to ____” and instead they give a gift card to somewhere that I don’t go. To me that says “it wasn’t convenient for me to go get a gift card from that place you like, so I got this one instead.”

I like gift cards for places that I like to shop in, but wouldn’t normally justify affording. And book tokens.

My mother used to give me checks for my birthday but switched to gift cards because I would accept but then not cash her checks (she can’t really afford it and I felt guilty taking money from her).

The only other good reason I’ve ever heard for giving a gift card instead of cash is if you think the recipient may not spend it wisely. My wife gives her brother gift cards to fast food restaurants instead of cash because she suspects (rightly) that he would spend the cash on booze or gambling.

The only problem with one of the bank-backed gift cards you suggest (other than the upfront fee) is that many online retailers aren’t setup to accept partial payments from these cards. I recently had $15 left on one of these Visa debit cards and was going to buy a book at Amazon.com I had been wanting, but the book cost about $20 with shipping. Now, if I attempted this at a regular bookstore, they would probably have been able to split the transaction between my gift card and another credit card. But Amazon was unable to split the transaction between two cards, they just declined the gift card. So, I’m left with a gift card that has a balance on it but can’t use it to buy what I want.

So what do you do when the balance on these cards get low? How do you use them when you don’t have enough left on the card to purchase what you want?

When I give gift cards, I almost always give store-specific ones. I went to buy an AmEx gift card from the supermarket one day for a family friend’s graduation, and they wanted to charge me $3.50 for the card!! I said forget it, and gave the kid $39.00 in cash instead of a $35 AmEx gift card that I have to pay extra for!

And a question, does anyone know why stores can’t calculate gift card sales into their revenue? I was just reading an article the other day that it only counts as revenue when someone redeems it, and that’s why it’s bad for the economy in general when people don’t redeem gift cards. This seems silly, especially considering that the store has already received money for the “purchase.” Anyone have any insight into this?

Linen n’ things always have the “this item is $49 after a $30 rebate” sales. The rebate came in the form of gift cards to be spent at Linen n’ Things. I’ve had a rebate gift card for two years and still haven’t spent it.

I called their 1-800 number and it doesn’t expire. At least that’s better than some gift cards I get, which do expire.

In my eyes, gift cards are GOOD when:
1. the recipient likes shopping at a certain store, but normally can’t afford it (I rarely shop at LL Bean, except when I have a gift card)
2. they allow a recipient to buy something they would buy anyway, but which is time-limited (I give one of my aunts a Starbucks card, which she’ll use to treat herself to frozen drinks in the summer) – this dovetails with #1
3. they are for something very personal that the recipient wouldn’t think of getting themselves (one of our wedding gifts was a gift certificate for an online hammock store – we had never thought of getting a hammock, but it allowed us to pick out exactly the one we chose)

Too often, we just default to giving a gift card because it’s easy and “seems” more thoughtful than just giving cash.

I wonder how many gift cards get re-gifted…

I don’t mind getting gift cards to my favorite sewing store, because I actually use them. But I’ve probably let other ones expire.

We use the bank cards for groceries, actually, so that we get them used up quickly. Then we transfer money from the grocery budget to whatever we were planning to use the gift for–savings, new coat, etc.