[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.