“Gift” cards
Lor’s family is Carpatho-Russian Orthodox, and so they celebrate Christmas on what most of us call January 7. It is actually December 25 when using what most Orthodox refer to as the “Old Calendar”, but that’s another discussion entirely. This has several practical implications, from being able to spend quality time with both of our families, to being able to take advantage of after Christmas sales to buy, in fact, Christmas presents.
The other day, we went to the still-relatively-new Pittsburgh Mills mall to do some final Christmas shopping for her family, and the last item on our list was a mall gift card for our niece. You know, the ones issued by the mall itself, that can be used at any store in the mall. Our niece likes several of the stores at the Mills, so we figured this way she could choose where and how she wanted to use the card.
It turns out that there is a $1.50 fee for the cards. That’s right, if you buy a $25.00 gift card, it’ll cost you $26.50, and the card will only have a value of $25.00. They call it a processing fee, or some such nonsense, but I call it selling money. Ok, fine, we figured that we would just grit our teeth this time and buy the card since it still offered the convenience of being able to be used at any store in the mall.
It also turns out that “any store” does not actually mean any store. The gift cards are issued by Discover Card, which means that any merchant in the mall that does not accept Discover Card credit cards will not accept the mall gift card. Ok, we gritted our teeth a bit more but decided we would still buy the gift card since the list of non-accepting merchants was small, and probably none of them was on our niece’s top five list of favorite stores.
Just as we were about to buy the card, the information desk employee, who completely agreed with us at this point about the absurdity of this mall gift card, offered the final straw of information. If the card is not used for six months it starts incurring a monthly maintenance fee of $2.50. That’s right, if you buy a $25.00 Pittsburgh Mills gift card, it will be worth $0.00 after 16 months. Besides the fact that in our case, this is entirely possible since our niece lives over an hour away and only makes a few special trips to Pittsburgh each year, the utter ridiculousness of this should be enough to dissuade anyone in their right mind from buy a gift card.
Remember, when you buy the card, Discover Card already has your money. You just paid them, and this maintenance fee amounts to paying Discover Card twice for the same thing.
At this point, all of us, including the information desk employee decided that the more sane course of action would be simply to pick one or two of our niece’s favorite stores and buy gift cards at those stores. And that’s exactly what we did. The gift cards bought at these stores were of the more reasonable variety. That is, no fee, no maintenance fee, no expiration.
So hurry! Head out to the mall! Trade in your already-earned, unlimited use, non-expiring cash for some nice shiny new-fangled, for-fee, restricted-use, self-destructing, plastic money.
No comments:
Post a Comment