I've had this thought about payment cards for a long time now. Corporations are pulling a reverse Superman III on us and keeping our pennies and dollars on these gift cards and payment cards that can never quite be zeroed out. If you added up all the lost change from all of these cards over someone's life it could be a fairly non-trivial amount of money. Add this up over a whole economy of people and you have millions of dollars of change that you've siphoned out of people by making it too difficult to spend.

There should be a law mandating the ability to convert gift cards or payment cards back into cash, or to reverse the transaction onto a credit card.