| Saturday, December 17, 2005 |
12:32 - Give the gift of reduced choice
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It's amusing to watch the sudden proliferation of gift cards this year. Every retailer is doing one, it seems—not just REI and Macy's and iTunes and Barnes & Noble, but Safeway and Chipotle and McDonald's. Can you imagine getting a McDonald's gift card? (Their ads try to make airy and vague claims about how you get more than food with one—you also get fun, somehow. I don't get it.)
It's a retailer's dream come true, though. There's nothing they have to make in order to sell one. They can be stocked effortlessly in checkout counters anywhere. And best of all, like rebates, a significant number of them never get redeemed. I noticed that a Borders card I got a while ago proudly said, "No fee for non-usage!" Yeah, like they're going to complain that someone paid them for a gift card that nobody ever used to claim any merchandise. That outcome is in their interest, you know.
This isn't to say gift cards don't make a good gift. What I find funny, though, is the premise upon which they're based. Let's see... you're buying someone a card... that's worth a certain centrally stored amount of money... good only at the retailer advertised on the card.
The card doesn't have to exist at all for a person to give someone else exactly the same largesse. The only reason gift cards exist is the fact that society has declared it gauche to give money as a gift.
The only benefit that a gift card provides over money is a dubious one—that the fact that it's for a certain store will suggest to the recipient that that store might be a good place to buy something he might want, which he might possibly not have considered before. I might get a Fry's gift card and use that as an excuse to go buy some piece of computer junk at Fry's rather than just going ignorantly without. If I'd just received money, I'd have simply put it in my HELOC and forgotten about it. But at least with a gift card you're likely to buy an actual gift with it.
But the bottom line is that gift cards provide all the benefits of money except the LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE part. If it weren't for the fact that giving money is considered bad form, gift cards would be laughed off the shelves, because what they really represent is a restricted form of money—money without the choice of where to spend it.
In fact, I even saw an American Express gift card at Safeway the other day. Apparently the idea being that you buy someone a certain chunk of credit on their American Express card. Its slogan? Give the gift of choice..
As opposed to all those other gift cards, of course, with their implicit lack of choice. But if you really wanted to "give the gift of choice", you'd write a check.
Now, again, I'm not saying gift cards make bad gifts; I certainly don't mind receiving them. In fact, for the aforementioned psychological reasons, I would prefer them to getting money, because I know I need to be able to get frivolous items once in a while in order to stay sane. A man cannot live on mortgage payments alone. It's just probably a good idea to retain no illusions about what gift cards actually are.
...Wait. No... actually, scratch that. Sometimes illusions are good things. They sure make shopping easier. I mean, at least a gift card gives the recipient more choice than an actual gift, right?
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Brian Tiemann
