[harryh]

Gift cards as generally implemented today are awful. You pay for something now that often doesn't get used for a long time. In lots of cases gift cards don't get used at all. IIRC it's something like 25% of the time. It might be a bit less with digital cards that you can't lose, but it'll still be significant. It's disappointing that Square's offering doesn't adress this core deficiency.

[brianchu]

On the contrary, that is precisely why businesses offer gift cards. It's because empirically some X% of gift card value never gets redeemed (the number I've heard is 10%, but that doesn't matter). To a business, selling gift cards without a discount is free profit.