SIGN UP TO RECEIVE THE LATEST POSTS VIA EMAIL!Gift Card Hassles
May 1, 2008
Do you have gift cards left over from Christmas and want to get the full value off? I was with my dad yesterday and we went into a Sears Hardware store. He was buying a power washer and had with him a $100 visa gift card that that he used somewhere earlier to purchase something around $8, so the current value was around $92, but wasn’t sure of the exact amount. We we got to the register he asked if he could use the gift card to pay for the power washer then use a regular credit card to pay for the difference. The cashier told him that he needed to know exactly how much was left on the gift card if he wanted to use it. Unfortunately the 800 number to call to get the current card value was giving a fast busy signal. In the end he wasn’t able to use the gift card since he didn’t know the exact value.
I use to have this issue but found a way around this. Once I get a gift card, I pay my T-Mobile or Comcast bill online with the full value of the card. The nice thing is that if the amount on the gift card was greater than the bill balance, you just get a credit balance on your account which lowers your bill for the next month.
I can then spend that gift card amount using a normal credit card and not have to deal with the “how do I get this partial amount off of my card?” issue. Plus this helps you get the money off of the card immediately for those cards that may lose value or expire over time.
If you have retailer specific gift cards that you think you will never use, why not try selling them on eBay?
I totally agree with your gift card post about not wanting cards from anywhere specific or ones that didn’t have Visa or Mastercard. I used to live in the Chicago area but I moved and for Christmas my mother bought me a Bergners gift card because I used to shop there, there aren’t any Bergners stores within 3 states of me now.
I was shocked to find out that Bergners does not accept their store gift cards for online purchases!
Great suggestion though, some merchants cannot split payments also. So even if you knew your gift card balance you would not be able to split your payment between that and another form.
Great post! I work for a company that manages and tracks gift cards, and we recently posted about this exact issue on savvywallet.com. There is a lot of mystery on gift cards. AMEX, MASTERCARD, and VISA all expire, and some of them actually need a $6.50 activation key. Essentially, it’s loophole and it’s on the consumer’s dime.
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Yeah we had that problem with our wedding. Since we registered with Carson’s (Bergners, etc) a lot of people just got us gift cards through the registry, come to find out that we couldn’t buy anything online with it. So we spent a long time in the store trying to use them!
Having had some of the same challenges with gift cards we decided to help others by offering a gift card exchange service. Now those gift cards which sit in your wallet don’t have to go unused. We give consumers the option of exchanging their unwanted gift cards for something they will use. Check us out at http://www.StarGiftCardExchange.com - and keep up the good work.