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I have a couple of Visa Gift Cards that have been sitting in my desk drawer for a long time. Fortunately they have distant expiry dates because when I say "long time" I mean one had sitting in my drawer, waiting to be used, for 2 years... and the other for over 4 years.
I frankly kind of hate getting these as gifts. I mean, I appreciate the gift. $100 is $100. But $100 face value seems worth a lot less when it's hard to use. And that's the problem with Visa Gift Cards. As Scott Adams memorably put it in a Dilbert comic strip back in the 1990s (well before he turned into a MAGA shill), "Oh, look, a gift card! Just as impersonal as cash but less useful."
I mean, who even gives gift cards anymore? It seems like a Boomer thing to do. ...Though actually GCs are more of a Gen X thing. Boomers would still send checks. 😂
GCs are tough to use because how often is something exactly $100? You might purchase a few small things and have a balance of, like, $12.23 left over. It's hard to use up. But what about buying a big thing for $100? Remember, this is the US, where prices are almost always advertised pre-tax, so a tag price of $99.99 comes to $108.24 at checkout. And a lot of retail stores basically can't handle charging a flat amount of a bill to one card and the rest to another. Even if most modern POS systems support it, my experience is that employee training often falls short.
A few weeks ago I saw the cards again in my desk drawer and, instead of shutting the drawer and forgetting about them for another few months, I thought, "Aha! I know how to get the value out of these!" I'd use them to buy Amazon Gift Cards.
Amazon gift cards are both more useful and less useful than Visa gift cards. They're less useful because they're locked to Amazon. Though Amazon sells almost everything, and while we're hardly Amazon super-shoppers we do buy enough stuff there that I could spend $200. I mean, it might take 6 months, but that's faster than the 4-5 years one of these cards has been around. And Amazon GC are more useful because once the cards are converted, Amazon makes it trivially easy to apply them to pay a specific amount of a larger bill. Getting the full value out of them with Amazon is hassle-free. Even better, when I bought 2 x $100 GCs, Amazon rolled them both into another GC I already had with a balance of $32.78 or whatever. So now instead of three smaller GCs I just have one bigger one. Nice job, Amazon.
I frankly kind of hate getting these as gifts. I mean, I appreciate the gift. $100 is $100. But $100 face value seems worth a lot less when it's hard to use. And that's the problem with Visa Gift Cards. As Scott Adams memorably put it in a Dilbert comic strip back in the 1990s (well before he turned into a MAGA shill), "Oh, look, a gift card! Just as impersonal as cash but less useful."I mean, who even gives gift cards anymore? It seems like a Boomer thing to do. ...Though actually GCs are more of a Gen X thing. Boomers would still send checks. 😂
GCs are tough to use because how often is something exactly $100? You might purchase a few small things and have a balance of, like, $12.23 left over. It's hard to use up. But what about buying a big thing for $100? Remember, this is the US, where prices are almost always advertised pre-tax, so a tag price of $99.99 comes to $108.24 at checkout. And a lot of retail stores basically can't handle charging a flat amount of a bill to one card and the rest to another. Even if most modern POS systems support it, my experience is that employee training often falls short.
A few weeks ago I saw the cards again in my desk drawer and, instead of shutting the drawer and forgetting about them for another few months, I thought, "Aha! I know how to get the value out of these!" I'd use them to buy Amazon Gift Cards.
Amazon gift cards are both more useful and less useful than Visa gift cards. They're less useful because they're locked to Amazon. Though Amazon sells almost everything, and while we're hardly Amazon super-shoppers we do buy enough stuff there that I could spend $200. I mean, it might take 6 months, but that's faster than the 4-5 years one of these cards has been around. And Amazon GC are more useful because once the cards are converted, Amazon makes it trivially easy to apply them to pay a specific amount of a larger bill. Getting the full value out of them with Amazon is hassle-free. Even better, when I bought 2 x $100 GCs, Amazon rolled them both into another GC I already had with a balance of $32.78 or whatever. So now instead of three smaller GCs I just have one bigger one. Nice job, Amazon.
