It's Christmas season again and retailers are really pushing gift cards and gift certificates this year. "Sales of the cards will grow more than six times faster than total holiday sales, to a record $24.8 billion," the National Retail Federation says. But before you buy gift cards for everyone on your list you need to be aware of the risks.
Roger McClannen bought a $40.00 Simon Mall gift card for his mother a few years ago. "I thought it was a good idea because it was issued by Visa and could be used anywhere that Visa cards are accepted," said McClannen. Two years later his mother had to go to a nursing home. "I found the card in with Mom's other cards. I intended to take her shopping to use the card but never got around to it. When I finally called to check the value of the card, it had gone to zero. The card was worthless." After 1 year, Simon Mall Giftcards (which cost $5.95 to purchase) are reduced in value by $2.50 each month.
But it wasn't until McClannen had 142 digital print credits expire that he got mad and decided to get even. He added a Gift Card Hall of Shame to his Froomb.com Web site.
"I purchased a block of 500 digital photo prints from Dotphoto.com because they were cheaper if I bought them in bulk - they were 9 cents each instead of 15 cents. I must not've read the fine print closely enough when I bought them because I found out later that they have to be redeemed within one year or they expire. At the end of the year I still had 142 print credits I hadn't used." There went another $12.78 down the drain.
"So I put up a page called the Gift Card Hall of Shame. The purpose of Froomb.com is to save people money, so it fit in with the rest of the site."
The Gift Card Hall of Shame has three sections: 1. The Bad Guys. The list includes Amazon, Simon Malls (which owns the Mall of America), CompUSA, Dotphoto and many more. It lists the terms of each card and provides a link that can be used to tell each store how you feel about their gift card policy. 2. The Good Guys. This section lists stores that have consumer-friendly gift card policies. These stores' gift cards have no expiration date and they charge no dormancy fees (the $2.50 per month that McClannen's card lost was a dormancy fee). There is a link to each store's gift card page to make them easy to find. 3. Innocent Until Proven Guilty. These businesses don't state whether or not their gift cards expire or lose value. Froomb assumes that these stores are among the Good Guys, but lists them separately until this can be verified. "Gift cards can be great time-savers but if you want to make sure that the recipient gets the full value of your gift, make sure you only buy gift cards from the right people."
After much arguing with a Dotphoto.com customer service rep, Dotphoto finally agreed to return McClannen's digital photo credits. "But the credits expire in 90 days," he said. "I guess I'd better take lots of Christmas photos."
Roger McClannen runs the http://froomb.com web site which is a directory of deal-of-the-day web sites (like Woot). His other web site is http://starcityemporium.com which is the world's larget shopping mall.
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