Show HN: Buy a gift card and support small business | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Buy a gift card and support small business

giftcardpledge.com

12 pointsseancoleman13 comments

Something to watch out for (in Canada and the US at least).

Many small stores use gift cards from their credit card processors. They pay for the physical cards in advance, and may not actually get the funds from purchases into their bank account until they are used. So buying a card now nets some money for their processor, but nothing for the store (when they need it).

Looks like a cool idea but it appears to be nothing more than a public posting? When I got to the page the top line said "Chad S. pledged to buy a $100,000.00 gift card at Google in Boston."

Chad is very generous.

The top post when I went to the page was:

</span> pledged to buy a -$89.00 gift card at Your moma in paris.

So looks like people are looking for web exploits.

I think I just broke it by submitting it with empty fields...

Thanks for the heads up. I fixed it!

Fixed it by deleting the database entry rather than actually making the Rails app handle this case gracefully?

Both actually.

Hmm, after you said you had fixed it, I did it again and all the pledges disappeared as before...

I have seen people posting this idea on Facebook and am not convinced by the economics of it.

If you buy a gift card the company may be able to survive in the short term by covering their operational expenditure. But then it will cannibalise their revenue in the future when people start to redeem them.

I had the exact same thought. It obviously helps during a cash starved time like now, but just seems to delay the inevitable. I suppose the assumption is that, by that point, there's hopefully other financial support in place?

I like the idea, very nice! Have you considered open sourcing it?

Yeah, I'm planning on it. I just need to move the Yelp API key from source to an environment variable and then I can switch the repository type on GitHub.

I'd like to see a similar pledge from small business owners. Stop supporting Neo-liberal idiots. It's great while it works, for them, but it's a horrible mess for ALL of us when it doesn't.

PS. I believe majority of small business owners vote-in pro-business governments and politicians (from Drumpf, to Nethanyhu, to Boris and the rest). Mostly Neo-liberal charlatans, which only work to strip public services to bare minimum in order to artificially boost the economy (i.e. mostly make their friends even richer) while putting us all in danger.

What we all need is a strong, pro-active, and humane government, which understands the economy, but doesn't throw us all under the bus.

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