[socialist_coder]

> The question was simple: why do gift cards have to expire? The answer that nobody wanted to say: because we don't want to leave money on the table.

My understanding from working on online game time / game bux cards (a little different from gift cards but not really) is that it makes the accounting much easier if your gift cards have an expiration date. Because you can't properly recognize the revenue until the gift card is used / expired, and if there is no expiration date, then you could potentially have revenue sitting around forever that you could never recognize. Terrible from an accounting / finance perspective. So it's not really greed it just makes things much easier to deal with and makes your books more sane.

That is my understanding anyways. I could be wrong.

[pgayed]

> So it's not really greed it just makes things much easier to deal with and makes your books more sane.

Thus serving the convenience of the accountants over one's patrons.

[tomatocracy]

It's not a problem for banks. They don't seem to feel any need to put an expiration date on their depositors' money.

Any sensible company should account for the gift card balances as a liability on their balance sheet exactly the same way a bank does its depositors' money.

The potential problem is that predicting how much liquidity you'll need to fulfill those liabilities in a given year isn't so easy. Banks are regulated to ensure that depositors are never out of their money. Some businesses have gone under as a result of getting this wrong with gift cards.