I caught this on the THIS channel last night. It showed people opening up cards that contained store gift cards, and they were saying things like, “What the heck? I don’t want another gift card, I never buy anything from this store! Why couldn’t they just give me cash?” You -ungrateful- people! Now the commercial was for some company that buys up “unwanted” gift cards, providing the giftees with the cash that they really wanted.
It turned my stomach at how ungrateful the recipients were acting. Honestly, I wouldn’t want to gift someone with an attitude like that. I thought the commercial was in extremely poor taste, but well… most ads are in poor taste these days any way. It just seems like they’ve moved into a competition to see who can go the lowest!
If you look through some of the past" What badly thought out gifts have you received?"-type threads, there may well be a demand for this sort of thing.
What is a vegan who is given a card to Saul’s House Of Leather supposed to do?
Someone who is gifting a card should know the recipient well enough to choose an appropriate card.
People in commercials often behave in an exaggerated manner that would be odd or inappropriate in real life. You do realize that commercials aren’t documentaries, right?
Gift cards are awesome. If you give cash, that’ll just get put in the wallet or the bank and get used for bills. If I get a gift card it means I can actually get something cool from a specific place, I don’t have to think about “should I put this aside for something else?”
It was the whole tone of the commercial that got to me. I’ve purchased gift cards in the past - in most cases, they have been for the larger, higher end stores or (as my son prefers) a reloadable Visa card.
If I was burdened with bills, I would much rather get cash that I could use to pay them, instead of a gift card that requires me to buy something that I probably don’t really need, from a store chosen by someone else, that I may not patronize. I’d much prefer the cash in that situation!
Not quite sure how to respond to this, other than to say that gifts are not meant to pay your bills or support your lifestyle.
They are supposed to be something that says “you are important to me”, something that YOU (specific you) can look back on later and recall the special relationship you have such that someone cares enough to give you a present. If they pay your utilities bill, how is that achieved?
I know that if I use your cash gift to pay my power bill, that will make me feel all warm and fuzzy for the next month!
To me, though, a thoughtful gift is one that indicates that the giver understands the recipient. Sometimes, a gift card to a specific store is very thoughtful (for example, my mother-in-law knows that I love to read, but doesn’t know what books I have/want, and wants to make sure that I spend the money on myself instead of the family.) Other times, cash for bills is pretty damned handy (like this summer, when we were really strapped for cash due to my husband’s medical issues, and my parents gave me money for my birthday, knowing that it would be spent on purely practical stuff like school clothes for the kids.) In both of these examples, the givers knew specifically what would work best for ME - very thoughtful!
The recipient is entitled to nothing. Anything they get is already more than they are entitled to. Whining about wanting something else instead (especially money) is completely self-centered, unjustified and childish. The recipent is not entitled to a preference.
Although I sort of see where the OP is coming from, but in general, gift cards DO suck. My biggest gripe is that they have a built-in depreciation function, which means that the company/store who sold the card takes a fee after a certain amount of time. I don’t like the idea of someone using cash I give them for paying bills, but it IS a gift, so if they need to pay off bills, so be it. I’d much rather have that happen than some bullshit timeline that takes 5 dollars a month off of my gift because the person hasn’t had a chance to use it.
$100 in should mean $100 out. Fuck you companies for being assholes about card usage!
Hey, you never know. One year my company decided that, instead of just giving people a bonus, they would give us gift cards. We could even tell them what gift cards we wanted. (Target, Toys R Us, Sports Authority, Wolf Camera, there were a couple of others, including mall gift cards, but the choices weren’t unlimited, and the only grocery card was for Whole Foods).
Then they had the even worse idea of handing these things out at the company party, which was held on the last day of work before the holiday break. Meaning that, if you were planning to use your bonus to buy presents for, say, your children, you didn’t have a real big window of time for it. (Oh, we got a bonus check, too–it was just quite a bit smaller than it should have been, because of the gift cards.)
Now those were some gift cards I would happily have sold to a gift card broker.
I do want money instead. I realized that a bonus is a bonus and not something you’re entitled to just because your company made a great profit that year, but it should be a reward, not a hassle. I think the idea of a bonus should be more of a “Here, you worked hard, you earned this,” and less a “Look how generous we are, we’re giving you a GIFT!”
I’m surprised nobody is mentioning how much of a ripoff the service probably is- screams ‘cash4gold’ to me. I’m guessing a $20 bill is more valueable than a $20 gift certificitate to The Sharper Image and so you won’t get the full amount back but a percentage, and a meager one at that.
