Why I Hate Gift Cards

As you may have read, I don't like to shop a whole lot. My wife does the majority of shopping in our household. I guess the problem I have with shopping is that I don't like crowds all that much and shopping is just enhancing the issue.

So why do I hate gift cards, you would have thought that gift cards would be the perfect gift from me. Walk into store walk to the checkout line and two minutes later I'm walking out with a "great" gift.

I know that a lot of us will either get or give gift cards. The reason I don't care to give one is that it screams to me that here you go, I really don't know what to give you, and I didn't bother spending a whole lot of time looking for something that you might have liked.

They now even have a gift card for a mall. Talk about spending no time at all. Here you go honey; I didn't even know what kind of gift to give you. Why stop here, why not just go to a bank and get a bunch of debit cards with a set amount of money that way the recipient can use it to buy some groceries, pay off the cable bill, or buy some alcohol for the New Years party. How fabulous!

On the other hand, stores love to sell them, as a majority of us never spend the full amount of the card. Last year Best Buy had 35 million dollars that was never used. $35 million, that is a lot of big screen TV's. That's the kind of store I want to operate, no inventory, no returns, no customer complaints.

To compound the problem, some industries thieves have managed to figure out how to steal gift card numbers and once the gift card is activated, they will simply use the stolen gift card number to buy things. Once the owner of the gift card goes into the store to buy something, all or most of the credits have been used.

What a great scam. The store doesn't care because they already have the money. The gift card recipient doesn't bother telling the gift giver as they think that that person might be cheap and the gift giver is unsuspecting as they think that the card was used.

So if you get a gift from me this season, it's going to be something that you may like or don't like at all, but at least I spent more then five minutes to think about what to give you.

Cheers and Happy Holidays