How do I zero out Visa/MC gift cards?

Factual Questions
1

I work in a preschool.

A lot of the parents gave me gift cards that were just those Visa or MC spend-anywhere cards.

I now have a bunch of them with just a few dollars on each one.

Stores are telling me they can’t run them for the balance and then let me pay the rest on a debit card.

I don’t understand why, because when I have a card specific to that store, they have no problem doing this.

Is this some way of subtly discouraging the generic cards, and steering people toward store-specific, or is it something that Visa/MC does to keep a dollar or two from every card they sell?

And does anyone know of a way to zero out the cards?

2

Wow - I work for a store that let’s us use up whatever partial balance is on those cards and you pay the balance on your bill with either another card or debit/credit or cash or whatever.

What stores are telling you that?

I’d try something like a big box store to try to unload the balance on those cards (unless those are the stores telling you they can’t). You might need to know the balance on the card ahead of time because the register systems might require you to enter the exact balance on the register (even if ours don’t require that). You might have to go to a lane with a human being (so I guess Walmart is out) or the customer service desk.

3

I’ve received gift cards, and having a small balance can be annoying under the circumstances you describe. My easy solution is to go on line and check the balance, and then use that balance for gas.

4

Yeah, our store has no problem running several GC cards with small amounts. Does it take a while? Of course, and it IS a bit of a nuisance, but a happy customer is worth that.

5

Many years ago, I worked for the ecommerce division of a national retailer, and helped on a project to update the background system for handling gift cards.

Our website would happily process a gift card with whatever balance, and then ask for another payment method to cover the remainder. Any merchant who can’t do that now is far behind the curve.

However — and here is the relevant bit for you — we brought on board a specialist who had experience with these systems to help coordinate. She talked about having worked with a retailer in the past whose point-of-sale was limited in the way you describe. Their workaround was to get the total sale amount, look at the gift card balance, and then have the customer top up the gift card with the difference on a different register. The purchase then literally zeroed out the gift card.

Seems like a pain, but this would have been probably 25 or 30 years ago now. In any case, it could be worth investigating, if the merchant is able to put money on the debit card.

6

What broomstick said. I’ve worked for a number of retailers, and they’d all accept gift cards as partial payment.

In most states, if a store issues their own gift cards they must give you the full value. If there are any fees, the retailer must cover them not the card purchaser or user. They don’t have to accept the generic gift cards by law, but MC/Visa would require them to accept their branded gift cards if they are taking branded credit/debit.

You’re right in suspecting that if you have $1.20 on a gift card the retailer might well net a negative amount, if they are a small business. And maybe their point of sale system cannot handle multiple forms of payment, though that sounds very antiquated. The vendors at the farmers market can accept multiple forms of payment on the same transaction.

7

Of course most of them are using Square or the equivalent which are modern online payment systems, despite the rustic small-biz nature of Square’s customer = your produce seller.

A side question for the OP is how many and how much value are you talking about, and how much trouble is it worth to you to extract that value if it isn’t trivially easy.

[semi-related story]
My late first wife was a lawyer. And eventually became fully home-based after years of renting an office. We had quite the supply of pro office equipment. back in the day she did lots of snail mailing of large envelops full of stacks of heavy paper, so we had lots of postage stamps. First class postage has always been one price for the first ounce, and a different price for subsequent ounces. The two numbers changed over the years, and not always in sync, but that idea was and is constant. And 9x12s cost a lot more to mail than ordinary envelopes and we mailed a lot of thick multi-ounce 9x12s.

Anyhow, after 30 years of this we had quite a collection of oddball denomination stamps. We didn’t buy in huge quantities to begin with, but you’d end up with 12 of the 22cents, 17 of the 24 cents, and 5 of the two cents you’d bought to upgrade your leftover 22s to 24s when the price bump first happened. etc.

Over time of course e-everything took over and snail-mailing multi-ounce items became more rare. Then her business dwindled along with her health. And all along we’d been storing all the postage stamps in a box and I’d try to use up a couple or few of the lower denomination ones whenever I’d snail mail something.

When I was cleaning out the house to move after she died I roughly inventoried the stamps. Came to about ten dollars worth of small stamps and IIRC about ten $1.00-plus oversized rate stamps. I threw away all the ones that were not current denomination. (And yes, we’d long ago switched to first-class forever; it was just the leftovers from before then, and the second+ ounce stamps left behind. And the dollar+'s for the big envelopes)

It felt weird to throw away what’s effectively US currency, but the effort / reward ratio of storing then extracting that small value had slowly gone negative over the years unnoticed by me. Not my problem any more. Feels good now.


The OP doubtless has more money in her gift cards than I had in stamps. But if it’s too hard to extract, it’s too hard to extract. I have caught myself doing silly things to redeem a $1 coupon. Because way back when I was a kid, a dollar was real money. Not so much anymore. Something to think about.

8

When I have a gift card with just a few dollars left on it, I take it to work and run it through my machine as a miscellaneous payment, then take the cash out of the drawer.

9

Some cards will allow you to transfer the balance to a bank account. You would probably have to check each individual card for that. They generally have a web site where you can login to check the balance, add more money, etc.

10

This is how it starts. In a few years you’ll be running Los Pollos Hermanos as a front for a massive methamphetamine operation.

11

I’ve gotten a couple of low-value Visa gift cards from class action settlements recently. I immediately went to Amazon and purchased gift cards in the amount on the card. Then I could just use the amount any time I purchased anything from Amazon.

12

In my dreams.

13

Isn’t this sort of problem one way that visa / mc make money? The money on the cards is money they received, and have given no value for.

I wouldn’t worry about $5 here or there, but I’m damned if I’m going to make a $5 gift to Mastercard because that’s the path of least resistance.

For the stores saying you can’t: is that policy, or the word of a cashier? I’ve been told loads of untrue things by cashiers who just don’t know how to, or want to, do something unusual. (“We don’t accept dollar coins”—yes, you do.)

14

Yeah, I’ve seen lots of times an employee made policy based on convenience. Also, some small business owners don’t want to run a gift card for a small amount because it may be less than the service charge on the card.

15

I don’t think it’s a plan for someone to keep a dollar or two from each gift card. I think it’s a combination of a few things

  1. Visa/MC gift cards are processed as credit cards, not the same way as store gift cards are processed. ( They used to be called prepaid credit cards which is kind of an oxymoron but did make sense in terms of the processing )
  2. The amount remaining on the Visa/MC gift card is treated like the amount available on a credit card. If you try to charge a $25 purchase to a credit card with $2.13 available credit , it won’t charge $2.13 to that credit card and show a remaining balance of $22.87. It just declines the purchase if you don’t have $25 available. The store system can’t see how much is left on a Visa/MC gift card, but they can see what’s left on their own gift card.
  3. Some stores can split the bill among multiple payment options - but you have to be able to say “Charge $2.13 to this card” not just “Charge as much as possible to this card” and lots of people I’ve seen try to do this don’t know the balance left on the gift card.

There’s a not too difficult way to get around this - you will still need to know that you have $2.13 available, but you can use the $2.13 on that card and the $1.67 on another and the 52 cents on a third to buy/re-load an Amazon gift card or possibly another store-specific gift card

16

Is the merchant incurring a merchant fee on each card being run? If I pay a $20 register total with 20 cards, is the merchant eating 20 1.5% fees rather than the typical one or two?

If so, maybe the word “can’t” really means “won’t”.

17

Yes, Amazon will let you buy gift cards in amounts as low as $1.00. Then all of the little gift cards get combined into one larger and easier to use gift card. With Amazon it just sits in your account and waits for the next time you buy something. Other online places can probably do something similar.

Another strategy I’ve used is to pre-pay recurring payments. I used to have a $20/month charge for some online services. In the middle of the month I could pay $1.80 to zero out a Visa/MC gift card, and then at the end of the month they would only charge me $18.20.

18

Virtually all stores allow you to use up the balance - they just don’t know what the balance is. You just have to ask to “split tender” and tell them the exact amount on the card to run it for and it will run through just fine. Worked for me at all the big box stores when I used to have a lot of rebate cards - I 100% know walmart will do it.

19

No it’s worse. If it was 1.5% of the amount it wouldn’t matter how many cards were used.

1.5% of $20 is the same as 1.5% of 20 X $1. It would be a hassle, sure, but not a huge cost.

The issue is that each transaction has a fixed fee (say 80 cents) for each transaction, plus a percentage (say 1.5%).

So twenty $1 charges would be 20 X $0.80 = $16, plus 1.5% of $20 = $0.30, for a total fee of $16.30. The merchant would net $3.70.

When people say that they pay 2.5% in transaction fees, they are averaging out these charges over all transactions.

And it’s worse than this in many cases. The merchant may not even know they are accepting a card with added fees (e.g. “rewards” cards) at the time they are accepting them. So they may take a card thinking it’s a “regular” visa credit card with a 50 cent + 1.0% fee, and then find out via settlement that it was a “cash back” card and the fee is 50 cents + 3%.

The back end is monopolistic and opaque. And because it’s business-to-business the political will to regulate it is just not there.

In general this doesn’t happen in Europe. The regulators protect retailers large and small from the monopolistic power of payment system operators. A transaction that costs a retailer $2.50 in the US would cost maybe €0.25 in much of Europe.

20

One thing about being in Europe is that it seems the credit card machines are often “broken”. I’m guessing that the businesses just make up that excuse to avoid dealing with CC purchases. But in my case, it meant I often spent much less. I could only spend what I had in my pocket. And I would often reduce my spending to avoid having to find ATM machines to get more cash. Like at a restaurant, it meant ordering fewer drinks and skipping appetizers. So while the “broken” CC machine saved them the swipe fee, they likely lost out on much more than that in sales. Or I’ll take my business somewhere else. If “FroYo Blast” hassles me about using a CC and nags me to use cash, I’ll instead go to “FrozzyYogurt” which doesn’t care I’m using my CC.