Hm interesting. I think that would also explain why they make gift cards expire or lose value over time, even though, if anything, they should be paying you interest because you’re giving them a(n otherwise) free loan.
This is why they're treated as a liability in the company books. You can guess or bet that all of your outstanding gift card balances won't be redeemed at once, but there's really nothing preventing that from happening and causing cashflow problems for the company. And there's lots of overhead involved in tracking many many thousands of small balances on cards into perpetuity.
Much easier to encourage people to spend the gift cards and get your financing from proper, predictable business loans or bonds.
Imagine a business where people give you cash and don’t ask for 5% or so of it back. Meanwhile your use of that cash is regulated with a feather (compared to a bank or other deposit-taker) and you can earn some yield while you wait for people to ask for their money back.
Gift cards are very lucrative at scale.
Then, if they have any wiggle room, they can get a further increase by buying back a bond of higher yield sooner, modulated by expected cash flows.
>Much easier to encourage people to spend the gift cards and get your financing from proper, predictable business loans or bonds.
That doesn't follow at all. The longer the gift card goes without being spent, the more free money they get. There's no net benefit to the goods being called sooner.