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Comment by boyesm | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand, a retail store doesn’t make any profit selling gift cards for other stores.

The Safeway in this story didn’t make any money off of that $2k purchase of Target cards and it could’ve saved/boosted its reputation if it had some better protective measures in place. It also means that maybe people who would’ve spent money at Safeway now can’t because they’ve lost several thousand dollars.

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> From what I understand, a retail store doesn’t make any profit selling gift cards for other stores.

That seems dubious, considering they dedicate precious shelf and display space to selling them. Accounting can get crazy in the real world, but clearly they have a motive to move these things. The cards are on the shelf because the cards make money for the store, somehow.

I know that I have a lot of gift cards that go unused for months, or never used at all. Probably a lot of profit in interest on holding all the money and keeping anything not claimed after a few years.

It might be true that they make no money from the sale itself, but those displays are likely from a third party that is paying for the shelf space.

If you do a search for something like "gift card distribution", there seems to be a bunch of marketing firms that you can pay to get gift cards made and put in stores.

perhaps they are banking on the person buying other profitable items while in the store for gift cards.

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