[IanKerr]

I've had this thought about payment cards for a long time now. Corporations are pulling a reverse Superman III on us and keeping our pennies and dollars on these gift cards and payment cards that can never quite be zeroed out. If you added up all the lost change from all of these cards over someone's life it could be a fairly non-trivial amount of money. Add this up over a whole economy of people and you have millions of dollars of change that you've siphoned out of people by making it too difficult to spend.

There should be a law mandating the ability to convert gift cards or payment cards back into cash, or to reverse the transaction onto a credit card.

[gffrd]

Ready to cry a little bit? "47% of American adults have unused gift cards, and the total value of these unspent funds in the U.S. is around $23 billion."

source: https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/gift-card-statistics...

There are some other eye-opening stats on there. How about "The global gift card market […] is expected to reach $3.09 trillion by 2030"?

[nine_k]

Are these cards actually paid in advance? Or is much of their bulk effectively debt that would need to be repaid with a pretty low probability? See various coupons, mail-in rebates, points that you can only redeem in a particular store, etc. They look like a great deal, and are cheap to issue because only some of them are going to be redeemed.

[gffrd]

While it's not explicitly stated, the stats indicate this is gift cards that have been paid in advance.

That means "Get $20 back when you spend $100" and "Get a $20 gift card when you spend $100" wouldn't be included. Not sure about "here's $20 to spend on your next visit"—I suspect that's really the same as the above, financially, just presented differently, in that there's not $20 sitting in 200,000 individual accounts waiting to be spent.

[pragma_x]

Oh wow. And here I thought it was bad when someone stole my "dining dollars" card back in college.

[tootie]

I worked at a job that had a cafeteria where you have to put money on a debit card, then pay with the card. It's a penny stealing operation for sure since a lot of food items are charged by weight so they are odd numbers. I worked at that location for about a year and on my very last day, my balance hit $0.00 by almost pure luck. I have never been more satisfied.

[renewiltord]

In California, at least, it's quite strict. If it's not used for a while and the balance is over $10 it goes through escheatment and ends up with the state. But if it's not expiring you still have to honour the card. Then get the money back from the government.

If it's under $10 it's redeemable for cash.

[thaumasiotes]

> In California, at least, it's quite strict.

> But if it's not expiring you still have to honour the card.

This is an odd combination of sentences. In California a gift card can't expire.

[renewiltord]

I was under the impression that there was a timer. Only gift cards after the 90s are expiration free or something. But looking it up that was amended in 2008: https://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/legal_guides/s_11.shtml

[kevinsundar]

At least in California, any gift cards under $10 are redeemable for cash by law. But thats not saying the merchant will make it easy to do so. I usually have to ask for a manager and wait for a bit.

[AdmiralAsshat]

And increasingly, the minimum gift card amount is going up. You used to be able to buy Switch eShop gift cards for $5, $10, $20, and up. Now the minimum amount you can buy is $20:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=eshop+gift+card

Very frustrating for me, given that I still use these regularly for all my e-shop purchases, and can sometimes come up a single dollar short of what's necessary to complete the transaction.

Sony still lets you go down to $10 for PSN cards, but I'm skeptical that they'll keep it around much longer.

[teddyh]

“Like regular money but more fun!”: <https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/08/like-regular-money-but-more...>

(Warning: Copy and paste the link; do not click.)

[thaumasiotes]

> Corporations are pulling a reverse Superman III on us and keeping our pennies and dollars on these gift cards and payment cards that can never quite be zeroed out.

Use the low-balance card to pay for part of a larger purchase.