I have written about gift cards on this site before. Gift cards like Simon gift cards and Visa gift cards. However I had no idea that they were so popular.
According to the National Retail Federation gift cards are big business. BIG business. $26 billion worth of business to be exact, this holiday season. Can you believe that we spend that much money on gift cards?
A gift card like the Simon Gift card (which is in fact a Visa gift card) works as a way to give someone what is in effect a cash gift, but doing it a little more subtly than just giving cash.
The card is purchased to a value, then the recipient is able to redeem the value of the card at any place that gift card is accepted. In the case of the Visa gift card for example, anywhere Visa debit cards are accepted, although possibly with some exceptions.
It is possible to purchase gift cards in lots of guises. I, for example, have received a gift card from a large retail chain, but it can only be redeemed at that particular chain. Nowhere else.
However the purpose of this article is not to cover the particular gift cards available, but to alert you to the fact that gift cards are not as good a gift as cash, on a purely monetary basis. That a gift card purchased for, say, $50 does not enable the purchase of $50 worth of gifts or products, or if it does it may cost the purchaser more than $50.
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