Gift cards say, “I could have just given you cash, but I wasn’t considerate enough to also give the freedom to buy what you want. I have therefore restricted you to store of my choosing, for if I cared at all about you, I’d actually have been able to buy a suitable gift myself.”
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Showerthoughts
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Gift cards are great for family members who have addiction issues 🤷♀️
They're also great for the people in your life who you know are too practical to buy themselves something nice with gifted cash
can confirm. every time i get a gift card I'm as annoyed that I can't use it for rent as I am excited to be "forced" to get myself a goddamn fancy coffee or whatever
that being said when I was truly desperate in college I did used to sell them online using various exchanges. i usually got $0.70 on the dollar which wasn't terrible
Can you get a gift card for rehab?
A gift card is an interest-free loan to the vendor.
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
Or in California. For the USians, you can probably call and complain that you live in CA and have them reissue it.
In CA, they also have to pay out in cash if it's less than $10 and you request it.
🤣 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 ;)
I guess it's easier to write off if you're employer as you can get an invoice for giftcard. Also sometimes shops will offer you a gift card uf you're returning something outside of the customary time period of 30 days, but it's better than not being able to return.
What's vile is gift cards with expiry date which I cant believe is legal, even in the EU!
It’s considered tacky to just give people cash, but that would honestly be a better practice.
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.~
It's easy, my bank automatically pays off my cc monthly from my current account. Isn't it standard?
I guess it depends on what you call it. I’ve seen creditors that have autopay features that can draft it from your bank accounts each month. Usually those are for your minimum payment, which usually stretch out your balance for up to 30 years (to maximize interest charges).
I personally don’t like autopay. It’s an old habit from back when I would overdraft my checking on the regular because I always spent more than I made. Nowadays, I think it’s because I like the responsibility/control of paying my bills manually, and on my terms.
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