The holiday season is just around the corner with American Thanksgiving last week to kick off the start of shopping madness. People in Canada have Boxing Day sales while people in America have Black Friday sales. Black Friday is when merchants actually recover from being “in the red” all year and finally turn a profit for the remainder of the year. Saying that Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the season is an understatement when you see all the crazy people who line-up overnight regardless of rain or freezing temperatures. The thrill of saving a few hundred dollars on a big-ticket electronic item is only half the fun, the other half being the actual chase, and fight against your fellow peers for those door-crasher items.
Gift cards has replaced chocolates
Chocolate used to be the “no-thought” gift that people would give one another if they were too lazy to think about actual gifts. Nowadays, the gift card has replaced chocolates as the easy, no-thought gift. Even though gift cards are better than chocolates, they do limit you to only one store and they may have expiry dates. How can something that is treated as cash have an expiry date on them is beyond me.

Why do stores love the gift card?
Gift cards are a win-win situation for stores so I don’t blame them for forcing it down our throats. First of all, they are very cheap to administer and distribute unlike the gift certificates of the past where you had to manually fill out dollar amounts and reissue another one for the remainder of the purchase. Secondly, they allow the merchants to track what you buy with them on an aggregate level. They may not know what consumer Joe Blow buys but they will know that if Joe Blow buys a DVD recorder, he usually buys a universal remote control as well. This type of data-mining is worth a lot of value for companies. The most important reason why stores love gift cards is that people end up not using them! Gift cards that people receive usually end up not being fully utilized so it’s just free money to the stores.

They’re portrayed as an easy solution to the annual gift-giving dilemma. The demand for gift cards has soared since retailers began replacing paper gift certificates with plastic credit-card-like ones.
The problem is that they’re just sitting in our wallets much of the time like credit cards and not being used, or they’re getting hidden behind our favorite plastic.
The publishers of Consumer Reports magazine say that more than a quarter of gift cards bought in the U.S. last year were never redeemed and that cost consumers roughly $8 billion.

Source: News1130.com

Cash is king
Instead of getting a gift card that limits me to only one store, I’m hoping that I get cash instead. Cash is king because it can be used for anything. A Starbucks card will be useless to me because I don’t drink their fatty coffees nor do I eat that bloated scones. Remember people, Cash Is King!

No Starbucks gift card!