At least they updated this one to account for the no fees law. The standard advice on saving gas is recycled unchanged since the 1970s. Get a tuneup, they say. For you kids in the audience, a tuneup is a periodic adjustment to a carburetor. A carburetor is an obsolete mechanism for delivering fuel to cylinders.

ZAZ: At least they updated this one to account for the no fees law. The standard advice on saving gas is recycled unchanged since the 1970s. Get a tuneup, they say. For you kids in the audience, a tuneup is a periodic adjustment to a carburetor. A carburetor is an obsolete mechanism for delivering fuel to cylinders.

Exactly. Even NASCAR is no longer using carburetors.

Joke's on your, sensationalistic article, I live in Rhode Island. It's against state law for a gift card to expire here, ever. It's also against state law to charge fees on them, or slowly whittle down their value due to "inactivity".

ZAZ: The standard advice on saving gas is recycled unchanged since the 1970s. Get a tuneup, they say.

These days that means "check tire pressure and oil". It still helps mileage.

People say "dial a phone" too.

Also, #s 1, 3 and 4 are risks you take with ALL types of gifts.

If you buy someone a new set of windshield wipers, they may be, in order-

A) Stolen
B) Not used
and
C) Not used.

kingoomieiii: Joke's on your, sensationalistic article, I live in Rhode Island. It's against state law for a gift card to expire here, ever. It's also against state law to charge fees on them, or slowly whittle down their value due to "inactivity".

We have the same laws in CT. I don't get why other states don't.

Catch #2: A gift card that has already been used or activated.

It can happen with cards hanging in store displays and it happened to Nancy Parrot. "Before I went to use them I registered them online," she said. "And when I did that it said I just had a $50 balance and it's a $100 gift card."

What kind of idiotically retarded store would put already activated gift cards on display?

Reminds me of the guy who ran into a Wal-Mart, grabbed a massive stack of gift cards and took off, not realizing none of them were active and he just stole a bunch of worthless plastic.

kingoomieiii: Joke's on your, sensationalistic article, I live in Rhode Island. It's against state law for a gift card to expire here, ever. It's also against state law to charge fees on them, or slowly whittle down their value due to "inactivity".

Yeah, but it's your family members who live in other states who don't know anything about you who will resort to a gift card. Their states might not have those laws, and since that's where the card was purchased, that's whose laws it will follow.

Do most of these places still have identical-looking screens at the register for the different operations of "activate new card" and "add money to existing card"? If so, someone could easily bring a card magstrip reader/writer into the store, give the whole shelf of cards the same number, and buy one of them for $5... and then spend the cumulative amount of all those cards on Christmas day in a different store before anyone else gets to them.

/just sayin'

I thought that was a nation wide thing....

Many states passed laws over the past decade. The federal government added a nationwide law last year.

ZAZ: I thought that was a nation wide thing....

Many states passed laws over the past decade. The federal government added a nationwide law last year.

The feds didn't eliminate fees, though, they just restricted them to once a month after at least 12 months of inactivity, and upped the reporting requirements.

H.R. 267, Credit Card Act of 2009

SFSailor: scottydoesntknow: It can happen with cards hanging in store displays and it happened to Nancy Parrot. "Before I went to use them I registered them online," she said. "And when I did that it said I just had a $50 balance and it's a $100 gift card."

What kind of idiotically retarded brazenly-criminal, yet clever, store clerk would put already activated gift cards on display?

Sounds like there is some form of scam going on there. Not sure what level... maybe just the clerk activating a different amount than was purchased and pocketing the difference, maybe the whole store is being run fraudulently... but I bet it wasn't just idiocy.

/ gift cards are stupid, but not only for this reason

The clerk can't pocket the difference unless you pay in cash, because when they balance out their drawer at the end of the shift the system treats credit card purchases different than the cash in the drawer.

Which is why I always purchase my electronic currency* with other electronic currency**, which I then pay off by transferring electronic currency***. And when I do it that way, I get a bonus amount of electronic currency****.

*gift card
**credit card
***checking account
****airline miles
*****stars are the new slashies
*virgule asterisk

Oznog

In some states unused gift cards become the property of the state. See "escheat." The state also claims unredeemed bottle deposits.

Oznog: I recall seeing some weirdness on gift cards having "expiration dates".

See, if they don't have expiration dates, and they never get used and eventually "lost", it creates a nearly unprecedented financial weirdness.

Technically, it looks like you've just given the money back to the company that issued the cert. But corporate accounting can't work that way. Rather, they MUST list all outstanding, valid gift certificates as debts. Debts that can never be resolved, because there is no mechanism to pay you back. They could be moving to get bought out by another company and this comes it "says here that you owe $67,871.34 in gift certificates, are we inheriting your perpetual debt when we acquire you?"

It does something that otherwise almost never happens. Once the certificate is lost/destroyed, cash effectively disappears forever. Technically it's still there, but exists in the form of a totally inert debt to you. If there's no expiration date, the merchant's accounting cannot simply absolve the debt and spend the money. They didn't actually gain money- they issue a $20 certificate, gain $20 but account a $20 debt for a net accounting gain of $0, and that situation persists indefinitely. The person who lost the certificate did not gain $20. The money just... disappears.

"Nearly unprecedented" might be a bit hyperbolic.

Most places choose not to record the sale of a gift card as Revenue; instead, they consider it Deferred Revenue and don't actually record the sale as Revenue until the card is redeemed. It's a liability, but it's not a debt, so it's not subject to the same laws and regulations concerning debts during a takeover or bankruptcy. On public balance sheets, it may be lumped in with "Accrued Expense/Other Liability." This system is similar to how companies have recognized layaway purchases for many years.

To resolve aging Deferred Revenue (cards that are never redeemed), companies will compute or assume an annual "breakage" amount, i.e., the percentage of gift cards that never get redeemed, and use that percentage to sunset old Deferred Revenue after a certain amount of time. The breakage percentage is usually based on historical data.

It's not a financial nightmare, it's just a little non-standard. The issue comes when audits roll around, since Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP) don't really talk about this situation much, and different companies record things different ways. Companies use expiration dates and non-usage fees as ways of getting around the accounting provisions for recognizing already-sunsetted cards, but they're not truly necessary.

JackieRabbit: Whenever anyone send me a gift card, I usually just round file it.

...and by "round file" you of course mean "an envelope with a stamp and Gordian Cipher's address on it", right?

Right?

/of course you do